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THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE 
CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



Et inde admonitus redire ad memetipsum, intravi in intima mea, duce 
te ; et potui, quoniam factus es adjutor meus. Intravi, et vidi qualicum- 
que oculo animas mea?, supra eumdem oculum animas mea?, supra 
mentem meam, lucem incommutabilem ; non hanc vulgarem et con- 
spicuam omni carni : nee quasi ex eodem genere grandior erat, tanquam 
si ista multo multoque clarius claresceret, totumque occuparet magnitu- 
dine. Non hoc ilia erat ; sed aliud, aliud valde ab istis omnibus. Nee 
ita erat supra mentem meam sicut oleum supra aquam, nee sicut ccelum 
super terram ; sed superior, quia ipsa fecit me, et ego inferior, quia factus 
sum ab ea. Qui novit veritatem, novit earn ; et qui novit earn, novit 
seternitatem. Charitas novit earn. O aeterna Veritas, et vera charitas, et 
chara asternitas ! tu es Deus meus ; tibi suspiro die ac nocte. Et cum 
te primum cognovi, tu assumpsisti me, ut viderem esse quod viderem, 
et nondum me esse qui viderem. Et reverberasti infirmitatem aspectus 
mei, radians in me vehementer, et contremui amore et horrore ; et inveni 
longe me esse a te in regione dissimilitudinis, tanquam audirem vocem 
tuam de excelso : Cibus sum grandium ; cresce, et manducabis me. Nee 
tu me in te mutabis, sicut cibum carnis tuas ; sed tu mutaberis in me. 
Et cognovi quoniam pro iniquitate erudisti hominem, et tabescere fecisti 
sicut araneam animam meam ; et dixi : Numquid nihil est veritas, 
quoniam neque per finita, neque per infinita locorum spatia diffusa est. 
Et clamasti de longinquo : I mo vero, Ego su?n qui sum. Et audivi 
sicut auditur in corde, et non erat prorsus unde dubitarem ; faciliusque 
dubitarem vivere me, quam non esse veritatem, quae per ea quae facta 
sunt, intellecta conspicitur. — AUGUSTINE. 

There is not anything that I know, which hath done more mischief to 
Religion, than the disparaging of Reason, under pretence of respect and 
favour to it : For hereby the very Foundations of Christian Faith have 
been undermin'd, and the World prepared for Atheism. And if Reason 
must not be heard, the Being of a God, and the Authority of Scripture, 
can neither be proved nor defended; and so our Faith drops to the 
Ground like a House that hath no Foundation. — Glanvill. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE 
CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



BY 



ANDREW MARTIN FAIRBAIRN, M.A., D.D., LL.D. 

PRINCIPAL OF MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD 

AUTHOR OF " STUpiES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION " 

"CHRIST IN MODERN THEOLOGY." ETC. 



ov yap iuTLV 7rpoaco7roXrjyJAia irapa tw ©ew 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1902 

All rights reserved 



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CONGRESS, 
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WAY. f5 J902 

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CLASS CC XXc. No 

S> i o o -> 

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I COPY 8.1 

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Copyright, 1902, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped May, 1902, 



NortoooO 5P«sa 

i. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 

Norwood Maas. U.S.A. 



THIS BOOK 

IS DEDICATED TO 

ALEXANDER MACKENNAL 
ALBERT SPICER 

AND TO THE MEMORY OF 

ROBERT WILLIAM DALE 

IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF 

SERVICES 

RENDERED FREELY AND WITHOUT STINT TO 

MANSFIELD COLLEGE 

AND OF 

FRIENDSHIPS 

WHICH HAVE ENHANCED THE WORTH AND THE JOY OF LIFE 

X<xp<.s TlKTei X^P IV 



P.C.R. 



PREFACE 

THIS book may be described as an attempt to do two 
things : first, to explain religion through nature and 
man ; and, secondly, to construe Christianity through religion. 
The author conceives religion to be a joint product of the 
mind within man and the nature around him, the mind being 
the source of the ideas which constitute its soul, the nature 
around determining the usages and customs which build 
up its body. He does not think, therefore, that any one of 
its special forms can be explained without the local nature 
which begot and shaped it, or that its general being can be 
resolved and construed without the reason or thought which 
is common to the race. He sees in religion the greatest of 
all man's unconscious creations, and the most potent of the 
means which the past, while it was still a living present, 
formed for the making of the man and the times that were 
yet to be. 

The beliefs of the author are writ large on almost every 
page, and these he need neither explain nor justify here ; but 
a word or two may be said as to the occasion which defined 
not so much the problem of the book as its scope and point 
of view. Some years ago he had the honour of being ap- 
pointed by the University of Chicago lecturer on the Haskell 
foundation. The conditions of the endowment were that a 
certain number of lectures should be delivered in India, 
especially in the Presidency towns. In India the author 
suddenly found himself face to face with a religion he had 
studied in its literature and by the help of interpreters of 



viii PREFACE 

many minds and tongues, and this contact with reality at 
once illuminated and perplexed him. It was not so much 
that his knowledge was incorrect or false, as that it was mis- 
taken in its emphasis. No religion can be known in its 
Sacred Books alone, or simply through its speculative think- 
ers and religious reformers ; and of all religions the one that 
these can least interpret is the encyclopaedic aggregation 
of cults and customs we know as Hinduism. Hence he 
realized as he had never done before the force of custom 
and usage, of social convention and religious observance, the 
didactic and coercive power of a worship which can com- 
mand obedience where its value is doubted, or even where 
it is denied and despised. He saw a religion which had an 
innumerable multitude of deities and an indescribable variety 
of worships, which had grown out of a simple and primitive 
naturalism that had no knowledge of these gods and rites, 
which had had hosts of reformers who had yet only added to 
the mythologies and cults they had set out to purge and 
reform, and which still amid so many changes was conceived 
and described as one religion, and as continuous with that of 
the ancient Aryan men. Hence he was confronted with 
certain philosophical problems which he had to attempt to 
solve before he could think of undertaking any large his- 
torical investigation : — What is religion in general ? How 
and why has it arisen ? What causes have made religions 
to differ ? Is the multitude as good for man permanently 
as it has been necessary to his development ? What are 
the ultimate constituents of religions, — ideas and beliefs, or 
customs and institutions ? If by their usages and observ- 
ances some religions are native to certain localities and 
peoples, and alien from certain o:her places and races, — can 
a religion whose institutions are at once local and essential 
be universal ? How has it happened that certain religions 
have become missionary while others have never desired or 
been able to transcend the limits of the tribe or the home ? 



PREFACE ix 

What attributes must distinguish a missionary from non- 
missionary religions ? 

These then were the problems which created this book, 
for they compelled the author to study his own faith in 
their light. He could not but feel that Christianity stood 
among the religions which must be historically investigated 
and philosophically construed ; and that no greater injury 
could be done to it than to claim for it exceptional considera- 
tion at the hands of the historical student or philosophical 
thinker. For he who advances such a claim practically sur- 
renders either the truth and equity of his religion, or the 
integrity of the reason which was God's own gift to man. 
But it is further obvious that the mode of interpreting other 
religions, especially as regards the fundamental point of the 
origin and warrant of the ideas which are as the heart or 
basis common to all, has the most serious possible signifi- 
cance for Christianity. For if our primary and original 
beliefs be but the glorified survivals of certain " mistaken 
inferences " deduced by savage man from the phenomena 
either of his own dreams or of a nature he did not under- 
stand, then it is clear that every religion will be made to 
suffer from the inherent and inherited sin of its remotest 
ancestor. And, again, if great historical religions which 
innumerable millions of men, as rational as we, have pro- 
fessed through thousands of ages, be resolved into systems 
of error and delusion that only the blind deceitfulness of the 
human heart could tempt man to believe, then it is evident 
that we dare not use the reason or the conscience which 
we have so discredited either to believe or to attest or 
to justify the truth of our own. In other words, the philo- 
sophy that misreads the origin of religious ideas and the 
history of any religion will not, and indeed cannot, be just to 
the Christian ; while he who would maintain the Christian 
must be just and even generous to all the religions created 
and professed of men. 



x PREFACE 

This book, then, is neither a philosophy nor a history of 
religion, but it is an endeavour to look at what is at once the 
central fact and idea of the Christian faith by a mind whose 
chief labour in life has been to make an attempt at such a 
philosophy through such a history. The Son of God holds 
in His pierced hands the keys of all the religions, explains all 
the factors of their being and all the persons through whom 
they have been realized. And this means that the author 
would not, if he could, take the religion he loves out of the 
cycle of the historical religions. On the contrary, he holds 
that Christianity must stand there if it is to be really known 
and truly honoured. The time is coming, and we shall hope 
that the man is coming with it, which shall give us a new 
Analogy, speaking a more generous and hopeful language, 
breathing a nobler spirit, aspiring to a larger day than 
Butler's. It will seek to discover in man's religions the story 
of his quest after God, but no less of God's quest after him ; 
and it will listen in all of them for the voice of the Eternal, 
who has written His law upon the heart in characters that 
can never be eradicated. And it will argue that a system 
whose crown and centre is the Divine Man, is one which 
does justice to everything positive in humanity by penetrat- 
ing it everywhere with Deity. The Incarnation, as here 
read, is the very truth which turns nature and man, history 
and religion into the luminous dwelling-place of God. 

In sending out this book the author must record his 
gratitude to two friends : Mr. P. E. Matheson, M.A., Fellow 
of New College, Oxford, for his patience in reading the 
proofs, and for the many emendations in style and expression 
he has suggested ; and the Rev. R. S. Franks, M.A., B. Litt, 
formerly of Mansfield College, now of Birkenhead, for his 
labour in drawing up the Table of Contents and preparing 
the Index. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION 



PAGE 
3-19 

3-7 



The Problem of the Christian Religion .... 
§ I. The Person of Christ as the Mystery of the Christian Religion 

1. The Jesus of the Gospels and the Christ of the Creeds ; 

the place of mystery in religion ..... 3 

2. Mysteries of nature and mysteries of art ... 5 
§11. Need the Person be a Mystery . . . . . .7-12 

1. Dialectic analysis of the doctrine of the Incarnation . 7 

2. Literary and historical analysis of the same ... 10 
§111. Why there is a Problem of the Person . . . 12-19 

1. The common defect of the foregoing dialectic and literary 

analyses is neglect of the place of Christ in history . 1 2 

2. It is the divine Christ who has entered into history . 14 

3. The problems raised by the person of Christ are both 

literary and speculative. Christ is in history as God 
is in nature. Reason must construe the doctrine of 
His Person 16 



BOOK I 

QUESTIONS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND 
MIND WHICH AFFECT BELIEF IN THE 
SUPERNATURAL PERSON 

CHAPTER I 

The Belief as a Problem in the Philosophy of Nature 23-60 
§ I. The Ideas of Nature and the Supernatural . . . 23-27 

1. The incompatibility of the doctrine of the Person of 

Christ with the scientific view of Nature ... 23 

2. Hume's argument against miracles criticized on the basis 

of his own philosophy ....... 24 



xii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

§11. Nature and Thought 27-37 

1. Nature does not interpret man : man interprets Nature 27 

2. Nature and Personality : What thought gives to Nature 

and what sense perceives in it . . . . -3° 

3. Energy known in Nature because freedom is in man . 33 

4. Nature a visual language ; the intellect and the intelli- 

gible expressions of one Intelligence .... 35 
§111. Mind and the Process cf Creation .... 37-55 

1. The problem of Evolution not organism, but the Reason 

that organizes ........ 38 

2. Methods of solution . ..... 40 

A. The Regressive Method 41 

i. Man and ape in natural and in civil history. 

Why do their histories differ? ... 41 

ii. Darwin's petitio principii .... 46 

B. The Egressive Method 48 

i. Matter cannot originate Mind : speculative 
paralysis of the school of Hume : specula- 
tive passion of Science .... 48 
ii. Granted the speculative conception of matter, 
can the creative process be explained ? 
Intelligence in Evolution .... 53 
§ IV. Conclusions and Inferences ...... 55~6o 

1. A. Nature must be conceived through the supernatural 56 

B. (a) The real creation of God is spirit ... 57 
(/3) He remains in active relation with the spirits 

He has made ....... 58 

C. God's creative action never ceases . . . -58 

D. This is the meaning of the doctrine of Evolution . 59 

2. The key of all mysteries is man 60 

CHAPTER II 

The Problem as Affected by the Philosophy of Ethics 61-93 
§ I. The Problems raised by Man as an Ethical Being: Moral 

Judgements imply a Moral Standard .... 6 1-63 

§11. Empiricism in K?iowledge and in Ethics . . . 63-68 

1. Intimate connexion between the metaphysics of know- 

ledge and of ethics ... .... 63 

2. Moral systems of Hobbes, Hume, and Bentham . . 65 

3. These imply man's transcendence of Nature ; but fail to 

relate the individual to society ..... 67 

§111. Ethics and Evolution 68-74 

1. The inherited social inteiest ...... 68 

A. Darwin's theory of accidental variations ... 70 



CONTENTS xiii 



}-AGE 
70 
72 
72 

73 



B. Spencer's principle of conservation of life . 
2. i. The question of time not vital .... 
ii. The transmission of acquired characters dubious 
iii. Differences more important than similarities 
iv. The end not the adjustment of the individual to 

society, but of both to the ideal .... 74 
§ IV. What do Moral Judgements Involve? . . . . 74-83 

1. The question of Freedom 75 

2. The idea of the Right ; the Right as happiness . . 78 

(a) What is happiness ? . . . . . -79 
(/3) What sort of happiness is the measure of the 

Right? 79 

(y) Whose is the happiness ? . . . . .80 

3. Duty or conscience . . . . . . .81 

§ V. The Ethical Matt means an Ethical Universe : Butler and 

Kant . 83-89 

1. Butler and Kant compared 83 

2. Butler on the moral law and its Giver .... 85 

3. Kant's categorical imperative and his deductions of 

Freedom, Immortality and God 87 

§VI. Deductions and Conclusion ...... 89-93 

1. Moral evil transcends Nature because creative . . 89 

2. Self-realization the law of human progress ... 90 

3. Man cannot be measured by Nature .... 91 

4. Moral good is realized in persons 92 

5. A supreme Personality the fitting vehicle of the highest 

good 93 

CHAPTER III 
The Question as Affected by the Problem of Evil. 

A. Historical and Critical 94-131 

§ I. TTodeV TO KO.KOV J ........ 94 _ 99 

1. The problem appeals to the finest spirits ... 94 

2. Moral evil the gravest problem 96 

3. The problem intensified by belief in God ... 97 
§11. Optimism and Evil ....... 99-111 

1. Optimism of Plato and the Stoics, of Augustine and 

Nicholas of Cusa 99 

2. Leibnitz and Pope 103 

i. The Thcodicee ........ 104 

ii. The Essay on Man . . . . . . .106 

3. Criticism of Pope : Voltaire : problem of the survival of 

the fittest 107 

P.C.R. c 



xiv CONTENTS 



PAGE 



§111. Pessimism Ancient a.7td Modern m-117 

1. The causes of Pessimism . . . . . .111 

2. Pessimism Uncongenial to the Greek mind : compared 

with Mediaeval Asceticism . . . . . . 113 

3. Pessimism in Goethe and Byron: in modern politics . 114 
§ IV. Eastern and Western Pessimism . . . . . 11 7-1 31 

1. Philosophical Buddhism : its origin and aim . . .117 

2. Western Pessimism. Schopenhauer : influenced by 

Kant, Fichte and Buddha : compared with Buddha. 
Von Hartmann ........ 121 

3. Appreciation and criticism of Pessimism : Gain or loss ? 127 



CHAPTER IV 

The Question as Affected by the Problem of Evil. 

B. Some suggestions towards a solution . . . 132-168 
§ I. The Limits and Terms of the Discussion . . . 132-136 

1. The Responsibility of God 132 

2. Distinction of physical and moral evil : the painfulness 

of experience . . . . . . . 134 

A. Physical Evil : its kinds and functions . . . 136 
§11. Man in the Hands of Nature ..... 136-141 

1. Evils arising from the inter-relations of man and nature 

classified 139 

2. Functions of physical evils ...... 137 

i. Education in the arts ...... 137 

ii. Education in humanity . ..... 138 

iii. The motherhood of Nature ..... 139 

iv. Nature inexorable that she may be beneficent . 140 
§111. Evils Peculiar to Matt 1 41-146 

1. Death man's tragedy . . . . . . .141 

2. What life gains through death ..... 144 
§ IV. Evils Man Suffers from Man 146-152 

1. Classification : the problem raised. .... 146 

2. Trie physical constitution of the race morally educative : 

immortality and the problem of evil .... 147 

B. Moral Evil : its Nature, Origin and Continuance , . 150 
§ V. Moral Evil and God 152-158 

1. God as conditioned in creation ..... 152 

i. External conditions ...... 153 

ii. Internal conditions ...... 154 

2. Conditions defining the character and states of the 

creature. . . . . . . . . 155 



CONTENTS 



xv 



PAGE 

i. A creature necessarily limited in knowledge. . 155 
ii. The end of the creation God's glory and human 

good. God reflected in a creature . . .156 

(a) Moral 1 56 

(/3) Free 157 

§VI. The Permission of Moral Evil and the Deity . . 159-163 

1. Law and freedom necessary correlatives : involve possi- 

bility of evil 159 

2. Interference no remedy ....... 162 

jjVII. Why Evil has been Allozued to Continue . . . 163-168 

1. How moral and physical evil are related. God views 

the race as a whole . . . . . . .163 

2. A state of suffering not one of probation, but of recovery 

from lapse, the last word not Nature's . . . .166 



v/ 



CHAPTER V 



The Philosophy of History 169-185 

§1. The Significa?ice of History . , . . . .171-175 

1. Man denotes the race, history its articulated mind. . 171 

2. The growth of consciousness : its problems personal and 

collective ......... 172 

3. These problems of interest only when man realizes the 
idea of his unity 



§ 1 1. The Ideas of Unity and Order in History 

1. What the idea of unity signifies 

2. The unity as an immanent teleology 

3. Order in history a late idea, nevertheless necessary 

distinction from the order of Nature 
§111. The Cause of Order in History . 

1. Mind the maker of order . 

i. Man its vehicle 

ii. Action of Nature on Man 
iii. „ of Men „ „ 

iv. „ of God „ „ 

2. How does the idea of order arise in Man's life 

i. An ethical substituted for a cosmic process . 

ii. Primary passions . 
iii. Their regulation . 
iv. An ideal authority 

v. The ideal must be immanent 
vi. Does it exist ? . . . 
vii. Religion the answer 



• 173 
175-181 

• 175 

. 176 



178 

-185 
181 
181 
181 
182 
182 
183 
183 
183 
184 
184 
185 
185 
185 



xvi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

The Philosophy of Religion ...... 186-226 

A. Religion : its Idea and Origin ..... 

§ I. The Phenomena to be Studied: the Religions . . . 187-194 

1. The outfit of man, savage and civilized .... 187 

(a) Material: 188 

(/3) Spiritual ........ 189 

2. Vision of the Religions in history 190 

3. Religion the mother of order, and creator of law and 

custom ......... 192 

§11. Religion as Universal is Native to Man . . . 194-200 

1. The science of Nature and man incomplete without 

religion : man more than his environment . . . 194 

2. Man cannot escape from Religion ..... 196 

3. Religion as architectonic idea : the problems of Religion 197 
§111. I he Idea and Origin of Religion. .... 200-208 

1. Religion subjective and objective 200 

i. Religion an exercise of the entire spirit of man . 200 
ii. Religion a mutual relation between man and God 202 

2. Man the interpretation of the phenomena of Religion ; 

ethnography not a philosophy ; Spencer's anthropo- 
logical theory stated and criticized .... 203 
§ IV. Ethnographic and Historical Religion. . . . 208-215 

1. The ethnographic method subjective : the historical 

objective ......... 208 

2. Religion no superstition 209 

(a) Religion rooted in reason, but conditioned by 

Nature 210 

(/3) Ethnographical religion unreal : savage religion 

less significant than civilized . . . .213 
§ V. The Causes of Variation in Religion; Conflict of its Ideal and 

formal factors ........ 215-226 

1. Race as factor of change ...... 216 

2. Place as formal factor of ideas : transcendence and 

immanence ......... 218 

3. Influence of ethnical relations 220 

4. Influence of history : the gods conceived after the 

fashion of men . . . . . . . .221 

5. Influence of the social ideal on the conception of Deity . 222 

6. Influence of creative personalities : the Divine purpose 

in history ......... 223 



CONTENTS xvii 

CHAPTER VII 

PAGE 

The Philosophy of Religion 

B. The Historical Religions 227-257 

As speech to dialects, so is Mind to the Religions . 227 
§1. Religions as National and Missionary .... 230-235 

1. The classification and its limits : universal empires do 

not beget universal religions ..... 230 

2. National religions which are missionnry. . . . 232 

3. Missionary religions which are racial : Christianity 

seems western to eastern peoples 233 

§11. The Idea and the Institution in Religion . . . 235-240 

1. The universal and the local in religion ; custom in Greek 

religion and reason in Greek philosophy . . . 235 

2. Opposed action of custom and of thought in religion . 238 
§ III. The Idea of God in Religion 

A. Buddhism 240-244 

1. Whether a Theism 240 

2. Apotheosis of a moral ideal 242 

§ IV. The Idea of God in Religion 

B. Hebraic monotheism ...... 244-253 

1. Monotheism begins as a tribal cult .... 244 

2. But soon reveals its intrinsic character : 

Hebrew history of creation, man and religion . . 246 

3. Action of the idea and the institution within the religion 248 

(a) Jehovah transcends Israel : becomes ethical in 

character : man holy as God is holy . . . 248 

(/3) The tribal instinct controls the worship . .251 

§V '. fudaism at Home and in the Dispersion . . . 253-257 

1. How Greek life and thought made Hebraism Hellenistic 255 

2. Judaism as the victory of the local cult, yet as the 

vehicle of the universal idea 255 



CHAPTER VIII 

Founded Religions and Their Founders . . . 258-288 

§1. Religions, Spontaneous and Founded ..... 258 

1. Spontaneous religions apotheoses of Nature : founded 

apotheoses of personalities ... ... 258 

2. Personal religions rise out of natural, and need . . 259 

i. An historical substructure 260 

ii. A creative religious genius .... 262 

iii. A congenial society, in which to live . . . 264 



xviii CONTENTS 



PAGE 



§11. Impersonal Religions Classified as Personal . . . 265-270 
i. Confucius a statesman, but not the founder of a 

religion ........ 266 

ii. Monotheism not the creation of Moses, but of 

Israel ........ 267 

$ III. Religions, Founded and Personal .... 270-286 

A. Buddha and His Religion ...... 270 

1. Buddha the creator of a religion missionary yet Indian : 

the India of Buddha 270 

2. His philosophy and discipline ..... 273 

3. His apotheosis through the Church : his humanity 

humanizes the ethics of Buddhism .... 274 

B. Mohammed and Islam ..... . 277 

1. Mohammed compared with Buddha: his character and 

education: the vision of Abraham .... 277 

2. Islam and the sword : severity and mercy of the Prophet 280 

3. His religion and state : ultimate ideas of Islam . . 283 

4. The man incarnate in the word : the miraculous in the 

history of the Koran ....... 285 

§ IV. Canons of Criticism or Regulative Ideas for the Interpreta- 
tion of the Christian Religion ...... 286-289 

i. The Founder and His Religion a unity . . 287 

ii. He has both an ideal and an historical significance 287 
iii. His historical Person determines the form of 

His Religion ....... 287 

iv. His ideal significance determines its value for 

man 287 

v. His word never ceases ...... 288 



CONTENTS xix 



BOOK II. 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND THE MAKING OF THE 
CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

In Three Parts. 

PAGE 

i. The Founder as an historical person ; or Jesus as con- 
ceived and represented in the evangelical history 311-433 

2. The interpretation of the Founder ; or the creation of 

the Christian Religion through the Apostolical con- 
struction of Jesus as the Christ . . . 435-514 

3. The comparison of the elements and ideas in this inter- 

pretation with those most constitutive in the ideal of 
Religion as conserved and exemplified in the Historical 
Religions 5 17-568 

INTRODUCTORY 

Recapitulation and Statement of the new Question 291-309 
§ I. The Old Problem 291-295 

1. The common ground of the intellect and the intelligible 

in a creative intelligence 291 

2. The ethical in man involves an ethical God . . „ 291 

3. Evil owes its being to man, but increases the responsi- 

bility of his Creator ....... 292 

4. God as active in history ....... 292 

5. Importance of religion ....... 293 

6. Religions natural and universal : the achievement of 

Christ 293 

7. Christianity a founded religion ..... 294 
§ II. The New Problem ........ 296 

Its questions and their ancillary studies . . . 295 
§ III. The Criticism of the Literature and the Person . . 296-302 
The Gospels and the Apostolical writings ; speculation 

prior to history ........ 296 

i. This is according to the laws of thought . . 297 

ii. Does not imply neglect of the history . . . 298 
iii. The sources of the Gospels ; contemporary 

history in the Gospel 298 

iv. The eye-witness and the histories . . . 299 

v. The historian as an interpreter .... 300 



xx CONTENTS 

PAGE 

§ IV. The Religion and the Literature . .... 302-307 

1. Schmiedel and the Gospel history. The teacher a 

sovereign personality ....... 302 

2. The Gospels interpret Jesus as the Christ . . . 305 
§ V. The Founder and the Religion ..... 307-309 

1. False antithesis of natural and supernatural : problems 

raised by the Person and the history .... 307 

2. Three main questions : 

i. The historical Jesus 309 

ii. The Christ of Faith 309 

iii. How Christianity came to be a religion . . 309 



PART I 

THE FOUNDER AS AN HISTORICAL PERSON, OR 

JESUS AS HE APPEARS IN THE SYNOPTIC 

GOSPELS 

CHAPTER I 

How His Person is Conceived 311-330 

§ I. The Natural View of Jesus in the Gospels . . . .311 

1. Natural factors of character : and the natural view of 

Jesus 311 

2. Caiaphas governed by it ; his statecraft . . -314 

3. Pilate also governed by it ; the Roman touched with 

pity; his vision and his awakening . . . .317 

4. An immiraculous Passion becomes a mean and sordid 

riddle 322 

§ II. The Supernatural View of Jesus ..... 323-330 

1. The hypothesis of the Gospels common and prophetic ; 

its embodiment in a personal history .... 323 

2. The miraculous Person a rational and conscious unity. 

Jesus no mythical creation, but a study from life ; 

the natural and supernatural in Him .... 327 

CHAPTER II 

The Historical Person and the Physical Transcend- 
ence 33I-3S5 

§ I. A Sane Supernaturalism 33 2 ~337 

1. Acts and character correspond ; the mythical imagina- 

tion unhealthy ; extravagance of Jerome and Gregory 332 

2. Jesus embodied beneficence ; intellectual sanity of the 

Evangelists 336 



CONTENTS xxi 

PAGE 

§11. The Physical Transcendence is Moral Service . . 337-343 

1. The Temptation a subjective process ; its ethical signi- 

ficance 2>37 

(a) Conflict of the ideal of dependence with the 

ideal of pre-eminence ..... 338 

(/3) Conflict of a reasonable against a presumptuous 

dependence 339 

(y) Jesus ethical in means as in end . . . 341 

2. The temptation continuous and signifies that Jesus is 

governed as is man . . . . . . 341 

§ III. Supernatural Power as a Moral Burden . . . 343-348 

1. Absolute power depraves man unless he be as good as 

God ; it does not deprave Jesus 343 

2. Supernatural power alienates man from man ; but does 

not estrange him from Jesus ..... 346 

§ IV. The History of the Supernatural Person as a Problem in 

Literaticre 348-355 

1. (a) The Supernatural Person elevates the idea of God . 348 
(b) How should we write the history? The Supernatural 

Person. How the Evangelists do it . . . 350 

2. The Gospels as literature. As the world is embosomed 

in the Infinite, so is Jesus in God .... 353 



CHAPTER III 

The Ethical Transcendence of Jesus .... 356-379 

§ I. The Ethical Ideal of the Gospels ..... 357-361 

1. The ideal of the imagination and the real figure of the 

Gospels ......... 357 

358 

358 
356 
360 



2. Difficulties of portraying the ethical ideal 

i. The subject must be an unconscious sitter, as 
was Jesus ....... 

ii. The writers must be as unconscious of their art 
iii. Light and shade in the humanity of Jesus . 



§ II. The Sinlessness of fesus . . . . . .361-367 

1. The external testimony ....... 361 

2. The internal evidence 363. 

i. Jesus has no consciousness of sin . . . . 363 
ii. The Sinless forgives, yet is Friend of sinners . 364 

3. Jesus perfect ; yet without the mechanism of religion . 365, 



XX11 



CONTENTS 



367-373 
367 



§ III. Qualities of this Ideal of Sinlessness ; its 

1. < 'riginality ..... 

2. Catholicity ..... 

3. Potency creates .... 

(a) The idea of conversion 
(/3) Fear of sin and love of sanctity 
§ IV. Sinlessness and the Moral Person 

1. Sinlessness applies both to nature and conduct. 

nature not explained by one immaculate conception. 
Sinlessness distinguished from infallibility . 

2. The Sinless still a man ; but man ideal, imitable and 

Godlike ......... 378 



368 

370 
37i 
372 

373-379 
Sinless 



373 



CHAPTER IV 



The Religious Personality Interpreted by Himself 

A. The Teaching and the Person 380 

§ I. The Teaching and its External Characteristics . .381 

1. Tne mind of Jesus as the ideal and universal mind 

2. Simplicity and spontaneity of the teaching of Jesus 

Nature and man as reflected in it 

3. i. The real world involves the reality of the history 
ii. Jesus no abstraction 

iii. His teaching timeless and placeless 
iv. The sovereign idealism of the world 
v. What it has achieved . 
§ II. How Jesus Conceives and Describes Himself . . 391 

1. The reserve of His early ministry 

2. His claims .... 

i. He fulfils law and prophecy 
ii. He saves the lost . 
iii. "Follow Me" 
iv. His personal sovereignty 
v. His unique relation to God 
§ III. The Person and the Passion . . ... . 395 

1. The "Galilean Springtime"; the harbinger of the 

Passion 

2. His prophecy of the Passion ; His death a sacrifice 



-400 
-390 
38i 

382 
386 

387 
388 

389 
39o 

-395 
391 
392 
393 
393 
393 
394 
394 

-399 

395 
397 



CONTENTS 



xxm 



CHAPTER V 



The Religious Personality Interpreted by Himself. 

B. Significance of His Death ...... 400- 

§ I. Growth of the idea ....... 400- 

1. The disciples estranged from the Master 

2. His death " a ransom for many " . 

(a) Different interpretations of the term "ransom " 

(6) The term interpreted by the context ; contrast 

between the kings and kingdoms, their means 

and ends ..... 

3. Results of the analysis . . 

(a) Death free, not compulsory 

O) His motive ..... 

(y) His end ..... 

(<5) Worth of the ransom . 

(e) Its uniqueness .... 



433 
4ir 
400 

403 
403 



§11. How Jerusalem Helps to Define the Idea . . . 411 

1. The entry into Jerusalem is the King coming to His own. 
Which yet does not know Him 

2. Teaching of the Jerusalem period . 

(a) Exoteric : the parables spoken in Jerusalem 

explain the nature of His Death 
(/3) Exoteric : His anointing for the burying . 
§111. The Significance of the Supper . . . . .418 

1. The different accounts : the underlying idea the same . 

2. What Christ meant by the words of institution 

(a) The antithesis of the Covenants 
O) What the Paschal Sacrifice signifies . 
(y) Christ the Sacrifice, because the Head of the 
Race ........ 

§ IV. Gethsemane and the Cross ...... 425- 

1. Death as idea and experience ; joy in the death before 

Him ; agony in the experience ..... 

2. Interpretation of Gethsemane ..... 

3. The Evangelists do not represent the agony as caused by 

the fear of death, but by the thought of its means and 
agents .......... 

4. The horror of sin to Jesus ; sin made more exceeding 

sinful by grace. The Passion not to be analyzed ; its 
infinite reality ; the Cross creates the sense of sin, 
while the symbol of grace ...... 



405 

40S 
40S 
409 
409 
411 

411 
-418 

412 
415 

415 
417 
-425 
418 
421 
421 



424 

'433 

425 
426 



428 



43o 



xxiv CONTENTS 



PART II 

THE CREATION OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION BY 
THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

INTRODUCTORY 

PAGE 

The Facts to be Interpreted as Factors of Religion ; 

Limits of the Discussion 435-437 

CHAPTER I 

The Person in the Apostolical Liter \ture . . . 438-451 
§ I. Paul and the Pauline Literature ..... 439 _ 443 

1. His epistles autobiographic ...... 439 

2. His many-sided personality ; a consistent unity, yet an 

epitome of his day 44° 

§ II. The Person of Christ in the Pauline Epistles . . 443-447 

1. History in the Epistles and in the Gospels . . .443 

2. Christ's ideal majesty ....... 444 

(a) He unifies the Race 444 

(/3) He reveals God 44° 

§111. The Idea in Hebrews and the Apocalypse , . . 447-451 

1. The Person of Christ interpreted through the Alex- 

andrian philosophy 447 

2. The might of Rome and the King of kings . . . 450 
§ IV. The Idea in the Gospel of John 451-457 

1. The Prologue, its theology and relation to the history . 451 

2. The Logos translated into the Son, who becomes the 

Ideal of man and true tabernacle of Religion . . 454 

CHAPTER II 

The Genesis of the Idea 458-479 

§1. The Idea a?td the Apostolic Literature .... 458-460 
§ II. Whether Paul was the Father of the Idea . . . 460-467 

1. The psychological interpretation of the Pauline theo- 

logy ; manifold sources of the same .... 460 

2. (a) Factors in Paul's education hostile to the belief . 464 
($) Forces and circumstances prophetic of it ; where 

psychology fails and where it succeeds . . . 465 
§ III. Whether the Idea is the Product of a Mythical Process i,bi-\i\ 
I. The process transfigures the Person and the Death ; 

defects of the Muhical Theory ..... 467 



CONTENTS xxv 

PAGE 

2. Historical Laws which the Mythical Theory offends . 470 
(a) The mythical construction should precede the 

speculation ; here the reverse is the case . 470 
(/3) Speculation in general construes history : here 

a Person ....... 472 

(y) Speculation must be germane to the soil out of 
which it grows : here its product seems 
alien. For 

i. It grew up under strict Hebrew mono- 
theism 473 

ii. And apotheosis was abhorrent to the 

New Testament writers . . . 474 
§ IV. 77*i? Historical Source of the Idea .... 474-479 

1. The mind of Christ 474 

2. The interpretation of the Person creates the religion . 476 

3. The Incarnation the Epitome and Mirror of all the 

mysteries of Being 478 



CHAPTER III 

The Death of Christ and Christian Worship . . 480-514 
The ideals of theology expressed in worship 
§ I. Christ as Idea and Institution ..... 481-485 

1. The Cross the centre of Christian worship ; contrast 

with other religions, especially Buddhism . . . 481 

2. The Death of Christ in Apostolic thought more an 

institution than a doctrine ...... 484 

§ II. The Levitical Legislation and the Christian Idea . 486-492 

1. Christ in the new religion takes the place of the Temple 

in the old 486 

2. The Temple as an ideal of worshi [j .... 487 

3. The Apostles and the Temple ..... 489 
§ III. The Christian Idea as Interpreted through the Levitical 

Categories ........ 492-500 

1. The sacrificial idea in Paul 492 

2. Priest and sacrifice in the Ep'stle to the Hebrews : the 

transitory and the eternal ...... 494 

3. Conclusions of the Epistle 497 

i. The Son obedient to the will of the Father . . 497 

ii. Worth of the sacrifice : efficacy of the priest . 498 

iii. Eternity of His priesthood 498 

iv. Its universality ....... 499 



xxvi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

v. The sacrifice vicarious ...... 499 

vi. Significance of the substitution of a person for an 

institution ..'..... 500 

§ IV. The Christian Sacrifice as Interpreted through the Pro- 
phetic Idea. Peter and the Apocalypse . . 500-503 
§ V. The Christian idea as Interpreted through the Rabbinical 

Law 503-507 

1. Levitical and Rabbinical Judaism ; Paul's sense of 

defect in the latter 503 

2. His antithetic principles 504 

i. Redemption from the curse of the law . . . 504 

ii. Christ made sin for us ..... 505 

iii. The new life . . . . . . . . 506 

(a) The condemnation of sin in the flesh . . 506 

(/3) The constraining love of Christ . . . 506 

(y) Crucifixion with Christ 507 

§ VI. Love of Christ the New Law . . . ... 508-5 1 4 

1. Love native to man ; poets sing of a love that is dead ; 

but the love of Christ never faileth .... 508 

2. It is as sufficient for its work as are the forces of Nature 

for theirs 511 

3. The love of Christ necessary to the service of man . 513 



PART III 

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST AND THE IDEAL OF 
RELIGION 

INTRODUCTORY 

i. Nature of syncretism 517 

ii. Christianity not a syncretism, but the result of an archi- 
tectonic idea 518 

iii. Action of this idea upon the religion . . . .519 

CHAPTER I 

The Person of Christ and the People of the Religion 520-535 
§ I. The Problems to be Solved 520-523 

1. The people through which the universal religion must 

live ; how are local forces to be overcome? . . . 520 

2. The people must be created, though out of virgin soil . 521 
§11. The Social Ideal of Jesus 523-526 

1. His Ideal the Kingdom of God 523 

2. The ideal ethical, yet religious 525 



CONTENTS 



XXVll 



PAGE 

III. The Social Method of Jesus and is Impersonation . 527-532 

1. The method discipleship ; the vision of Jesus still 

potent after His death .... 

2. Possible alternatives .... 

3. His person His embodied deal; His society 

lated Person ..... 

§ IV. Positive Re'igions and Christ's Religion 

1. Christianity a personal, not a positive religion 

2. Christ's spiritual sovereignty . 

3. Characteristics of His social ideal . 





527 




529 


His articu- 




, 


53' 


• 53- 


-535 


n 


532 


. 


533 


. 


534 



CHAPTER II 



. 536-550 
■ 536-539 
■ • • • 536 
difficulty of the 

• 537 
• 539-54' 



The Ideal Religion and the Idea of God 
§ I. The Idea of God in Religion . 

1. Summary of the previous argument 

2. Immortality of religious beliefs 

advance to ethical monotheism . 
§ II. God Interpreted through Christ . 
§ III. The Christian Idea Makes for Universal Ideals . 541-547 

1. The idea of God dissociated from a tribe and attached 

to a Person 541 

2. The correspondent change in the idea of God ; His 

universal Fatherhood ....... 542 

3. Change in the idea of man ; the value of the unit and 

unity of the Race ........ 544 

§ IV. The Cotidition of Realization ...... 548 

1. The idea of Christianity appropriated by Faith . . 548 

2. The idea of Faith specially characteristic of Christian- 

ity ; what Christ has done for religion . . 548-550 



CHAPTER III 



The Ideal Religion and Worship .... 
§ I. Place as it Affects Worship ..... 

1. Holy places ; how they externalize and localize worship 

2. Religions universal in idea limited by place ; Judaism 

and Islam ......... 

3. The emancipation from place achieved by Christ; how 

the ideal may be carnalized ...... 

§ II. The Institution as it Affects Worship . . . 

1. The Institution and the idea of God 

2. How it affects religion ..... 



551-568 

551-557 

551 

5 54 

555 
557-560 

• 557 

• 558 



xxviii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

§111. Christ the Only Institution for Christian Worship . 560-564 

1. His Person conceived in the New Testament as an 

c6o 
institution J 

2. i. Christ's sole sufficiency the cardinal fact of the 

Christian religion 5 x 

ii. The Eucharist not worship, but a means of com- 

. 562 

munion ...■••• ■> 

iii. Preaching in relation to worship .... 5»3 
iv. The new institution founded by God not man . .562 
v. The institution defines the worshipper . . . 5 6 3 
vi. Its ultimate end the glory of God . . • • 5 6 4 
§ IV. Conclusion .' 

1. The failure in the ethical interpretation of Christ the 

Church's gravest heresy 5 6 4 

2. The place of Christ in universal history corresponds to 

the belief in His Person S 66 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE 
CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



INTRODUCTION 

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



P.C.R 



Kai avros ecrriv irpo iravTmv, km ra Traira ev aur<i> (TvvecmjKev. 

— Col. i. 17. 

Tolle deum a creatura, et remanet nihil. — NICOLAS OF CUSA. 

Gott ist das Herz oder Quellbrunn der Natur, aus ihm riihret alles 
her. 

Du musst nicht denken, dass der Sohn ein andrer Gott sei als der 
Vater, dass er ausser dem Vater stehe, wie wenn zwei Manner neben 
einander stehen. Der Vater ist der Quellbrunn aller Krafte, und alle 
Krafte sind in einander wie eine Kraft, darum heisst er auch einiger 
Gott. Der Sohn ist das Herz in dem Vater, das Herz oder der Kern 
in alien Kraften des Vaters. Von dem Sohne steiget auf die evvige 
himmlische Freude, quellend in alien Kraften des Vaters, eine Freude 
die kein Auge gesehen und kein Ohr gehort hat. — JACOB B6HME. 

Glaube ist die Abschattung des gottlichen Wissens und Wollens in 
dem endlichen Geiste des Menschen. — Jacobi. 



INTRODUCTION 

THE PROBLEM OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

§ I. The Person of Christ as the Mystery of the Christian 

Religion 

I. T~^ VERY reader of recent theological literature is fami- 
X_j liar with the remarkable contrast between the image 
of Jesus in the Gospels and the conception of Christ in the 
oecumenical creeds. It represents a change which time cannot 
measure or place explain. The Council of Nicsea stands as 
nearly as possible at a distance of three hundred years from 
the death of Jesus, while the interval between the Council of 
Chalcedon and the latest of the Gospels is at most three 
centuries and a half. But years and even centuries cannot 
describe the difference between the simple lines in which the 
Evangelists draw the historical portrait of Jesus and the 
metaphysical terms in which Nicaea defines the person of the 
Son and His relation to the Father, or Chalcedon distin- 
guishes the natures and delimits their provinces and relations. 
On the one hand we have the Son of man " meek and lowly 
in heart " ; humble in birth, obscure in life ; " despised and 
rejected of men," disbelieved by the priests and rulers, 
companying with publicans and sinners ; " crucified under 
Pontius Pilate"; forsaken in death by His disciples, and 
followed to the grave by only a few women, who were 
too mean to be heeded by His enemies, and who but 
loved Him the more that He had suffered so much. On 



4 BY THE MYSTERY RELIGION 

the other hand we have the Son " consubstantial with the 
Father," " begotten, not made," " very God of very God " ; we 
have a Person composed of two distinct natures, which must 
neither be divided nor confused ; for how could convertible 
natures be opposed ? or how, if they were separable, could 
there be a real and enduring personal unity ? If we 
attempt, first, to look through the eyes of the Evangelists, 
and, next, to think in the categories of the Councils, we 
shall feel as bewildered as if we had been suddenly trans- 
ported from a serene and lucid atmosphere to a land of 
double vision and half-lights, where men take shadows .for 
substantial things. 

Yet the two moments are too organically related to be 
characterized and dismissed in a series of contrasts. They 
are bound together by a dialectical process which has only 
to be understood to turn their antithesis into a synthesis; 
and in this synthesis the opposed elements appear to 
coalesce and become indissoluble, the later conserving the 
earlier belief, the earlier vivifying the later. For if we may 
reason from the processes of collective experience to law in 
history, we may say that two things are certain, viz. (a) 
that without the personal charm of the historical Jesus the 
oecumenical creeds would never have been either formulated 
or tolerated ; and (/3) without the metaphysical conception 
of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased 
to live. Clear and sweet as the Galilsean vision may be, it 
would, apart from the severer speculation which translated 
it from a history into a creed, have faded from human 
memory like a dream which delighted the light slumbers of 
the morning, though only to be so dissolved before the 
strenuous will of the day as to be impossible of recall. The 
religion which makes its appeal to the sense of the beautiful, 
and speaks to the fancy in legends, or to the imagination in 
symbols, may do well for a season or while a special mood 
continues ; but only the religion which addresses and exer- 



MAKES ITS APPEAL TO REASON 5 

cises the reason will continue to live. To say that the article 
of faith which the intellect finds the hardest to construe may 
be the most necessary to the life of the religion, is to state 
a sober truth and no mere paradox. This does not mean 
that the heart has to be satisfied at the expense of the head ; 
it means the very opposite, viz., that unless religion be an 
eternal challenge to the reason it can have no voice for 
the imagination, and no value for the heart. The symbol 
is only a thing of sense, most valued where it has dis- 
placed the ideal and become the sole reality ; but the 
mysteries which compose the atmosphere in which all 
truth lives, are too inseparable from thought to be absent 
from religion. The pure reason has its antinomies, but the 
very ideas it so describes may be said to be the laws 
which bind together mind and nature, which make a 
rational experience possible, and which set the personal 
intellect in the midst of an intelligible system. The faith, 
therefore, that had no mysteries would be an anomaly 
in a universe like ours ; and would suffer from the in- 
curable defects of being a faith without truth and without 
the capability of so appealing to reason as to promote 
man's rational and moral growth. For in the degree that 
a religion did not tax thought it would not develop mind ; 
it is the problems which most imperiously appeal to the 
reason for solution which open those glimpses into the 
secret of the universe that most fascinate the heart and 
awe the imagination. And the Person of Christ is exactly 
the point in the Christian religion where the intellect feels 
overwhelmed by mysteries it cannot resolve, yet where 
Christian experience finds the factors of its most character- 
istic qualities, and the Church the truth it has lived by 
and is bound to live for. 

2. But mysteries are of two sorts : they may either be things 
of nature, or creations of the art of man. The mysteries of 
nature are universal, and are known to man in every place 



6 THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE 

and in all stages of his culture, though their forms are many 
and most varied ; but the mysteries of art are a vaster and 
more mixed multitude, occasional in origin, partial in distri- 
bution, living and increasing at one stage of culture, diminish- 
ing and dying at another. The faculty which sees and feels 
the mysteries of nature is the reason, and the more rational or 
conscious it grows the more does it realize their burden and 
their impenetrability to mortal sight. But the art which 
makes mysteries is not so much conscious as spontaneous 
in its operation ; and shows itself in the skill with which it 
blends the fantastic with the real, and out of the impossible 
weaves the very texture of life. The mysteries of the reason 
are the problems of philosophy : this world, who made it, 
and how was it made ? Our rational experience, how is it 
possible ? Is it created by what man brings to nature, or by 
the action of nature upon man ? What are Space and Time ? 
Are they forms of perception or are they outside things, which, 
through association and sense, impress themselves upon the 
mind ? What is Mind and what Matter ? Are they two, or 
are they one, in aspect different, in essence the same ? Is there 
such a thing as Will in the universe and Freedom in man, or 
does fixed fate govern all ? If Necessity reigns, how is the 
illusion of Freedom to be explained ? If Freedom reigns, 
how are the uniformities of Nature and the order of History 
to be understood ? These are questions man cannot escape : 
art has had nothing to do with their making, or time with 
their origin or end ; for they are involved in the very pro- 
cesses of the intellect, and they grow at once more impera- 
tive and more complex with the progress of knowledge. 

But the other order of mysteries bears rather the tool-marks 
of made or manufactured articles, and have not the stamp of 
the inevitable which belongs to the work of nature. They 
may be the creations of Tradition or of the Schools, made by 
the hand which reveres the past too much to change the 
forms of its beliefs even where their substance has perished ; 



AND THE MYSTERIES OF ART 7 

or by the master whose ki oil subtlety has shaped formulae 
which later men may accept but dare not question. They 
may be but the fantastic shapes of an old mythology frozen 
and sterilized by the cold breath of the understanding, which 
loves to deal with the fluid forms of poetry as if they were 
stiff and pedantic prose ; or they may be speculative inter- 
pretations of historical persons and events, translating them 
into figures in a new mythology which is all the more 
audacious that it is a creation of the logical intellect, and not, 
like the old, of the concrete imagination. Of this sort are 
mysteries which all religions have been rich in, and which 
none seems to be able to live without. Hinduism transmutes 
the epic hero Krishna into an incarnation of deity ; Buddhism 
makes out of its founder a being with more infinite capabili- 
ties of change and action than any god ; Zoroastrianism turns 
the phenomena of day and night into the terms of an ethical 
dualism and personalizes eternity ; Islam so magnifies its 
Koran that it experiences a kind of apotheosis and becomes 
an uncreated Word, which had no beginning and can have no 
end, and which found manifestation but not origin through 
the mouth of the prophet. These are examples of the mys- 
teries which art makes in religion, and which are in their own 
order more intricate and invincible than any of the creations 
of the mythical imagination. 

§11. Need the Person be a Mystery ? 

I. Now, to which order of mystery does the doctrine as to 
the Person of Christ belong? Is it a thing of nature? or is 
it a made or manufactured article, a myth, which the logical 
intellect has woven out of the material offered by a simple 
but beautiful history ? It were certainly easy so to represent 
it, and to urge that by so doing we should relieve religion 
from an oppressive dogma, and religious thought from a 
problem which always perplexes, and even bewilders, the 



8 THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD 

intellect, if it does not provoke it to disdainful denial. There 
is, as we have said, in this case, a sort of infinite incom- 
mensurability between the historical person and its theologi- 
cal construction ; the one is so simple, so natural, so like a 
child of His time and people ; while the other is such a mass 
of intricate complexities, as it were a synthesis of all the in- 
credibilities with which religion has ever loved to shock and 
offend the reason. The spontaneous impulse of the intellect, 
therefore, when it first comes face to face with the modest 
premisses and the stupendous conclusion, is to attempt to 
divorce them, and to conceive Jesus as real, and the deified 
Christ as the product of idealization. And this attempt 
may be cogently justified by both thought and criticism. 
If we begin with thought, we may represent its process of 
analysis and argument somewhat thus : 

1 The doctrine that affirms that Jesus was " God manifest 
in the flesh," or, in other words, that in Christ the natures of 
God and man were so united as to form a single and in- 
divisible person, is the very apotheosis of the inconceivable. 
God is a Being too transcendental to be either known or 
rationally conceived ; but man is a child of nature and ex- 
perience : how, then, can we attach any idea to the words 
which affirm a union of these two ? — of the God who tran- 
scends our experience, and of the Man who is its most 
familiar factor and object ? But suppose it be granted that 
both ideas are alike real, is it any more possible to conceive 
them as so united as to constitute an historical person ? The 
incarnation of God in all men, the manifestation of the 
Creator in the whole of the race He had created, might be 
an arguable position ; but not its rigorous and exclusive 
individuation, or restriction to a single person out of all the 
infinite multitude of millions who have lived, are living, or 
are to live. God and man are too incompatible in their 
attributes to be conceived as co-ordinated in a Being who 



AS A MADE MYSTERY a 

appears on the stage of history as a human individual, and 
who has the experiences and suffers the fate proper to one. 
The man cannot become God, for man is mortal and finite 
God eternal and infinite ; and it does not lie even with the 
Almighty to invest temporal being with the attributes of the 
eternal. Nor can God become a man any more than His 
eternity can be annihilated or His infinitude cancelled or 
curtailed. To attempt to conceive God creating another 
God, or ceasing to be the God He is, were to attempt a feat 
which is impossible to reason. Then if the union is effected 
by God remaining God, and the man a man, what sort of 
being is the resultant person ? Nay, is he, in any toler- 
able sense, a person at all ? Is he not rather a mere symbol 
of contradictory ideas, as it were qualities which thought 
refuses to relate, and is therefore unable to unite, personalized 
and made into an everlasting enigma ? 

' The matter is not illumined, but rather darkened, by 
definition and explanation. The union has been defined 
as personal, and again as between a concrete, i.e. a divine 
person, the Son of God, and an abstract, i.e. human nature 
before it had taken shape in a personal man. But what 
is union in a person save a conscious unity, being realized 
and made homogeneous in the unity of a rational con- 
sciousness ? But is not the very note of this case the 
double consciousness where the person knows himself now 
as God and now as man ; or, what is still less rationally 
conceivable, as living a veiled and double life, where he 
speaks and acts as man, while he consciously possesses 
the omniscience and power of God? To a life lived under 
such conditions, what reality, what integrity or veracity, 
could be said to belong ? And as used here, are not the 
terms " nature " and " person " simply the catch-words of a 
juggler? When the speech is of God, He is described as three 
persons in one nature ; when it is of Christ, he is represented 
as two natures in one person. In the former case the persons 



io HISTORICAL CRITICISM EXPLAINS JESUS 

are plural, but the nature singular, and the argument is 
based on the position that unity belongs to nature and differ- 
ence to person. But in the latter case the person is singular 
and the natures plural, and the argument proceeds on the 
premiss that unity belongs to the person and difference to 
the natures. Apply to Christ the conception of nature or 
substance as it is predicated of the Godhead, and the unity 
is dissolved, because the natures become personalized ; apply 
to the Godhead the idea of person as used of Christ, and the 
argument for the divinity loses all its force, because unity 
of nature is no longer necessary to the personal integrity. 
It is evident, therefore, that a doctrine which can so little 
stand the criticism of the reason is a manufactured mystery, 
made by the art and craft of man, not by the solemn and 
inexorable necessities of thought, as conditioned and con- 
fronted by a universe which it must interpret in order that 
it may continue to be.' 

2. In some such manner, then, the understanding, by 
means of its keen and dexterous logic, might argue that the 
Incarnation was a mere fictitious or artificial mystery, signifi- 
cant only of the extravagances of the ecstatic or dogmatic 
mind, without any significance for the saner reason. And 
if we proceed from the destructive dialectic of thought to 
the analytic process of literary and historical criticism, we 
may find the fatal cycle completed somewhat thus : 

1 Literary analysis enables us to discover a primary and 
a secondary stratum in the Gospels. Jesus, as he is pre- 
sented in the primary or original document, is a real and 
tangible enough figure, capable of easy and complete 
historical explanation. He is the last of the prophets 
of Israel, ethical as they all were, but sweeter in character 
and in speech than they had been, larger and more reason- 
able in mind, as became one who lived under the influence 



WITHOUT THE HELP OF MYSTERY n 

of Rome and its universal ideas. This gives the source of 
His most distinctive teaching. Hebrew literature — Canonical, 
Apocryphal, Talmudical— supplied the matter ; the spirit of 
the time determined the form. His God is the Jehovah of 
the Old Testament, though sublimed and subdued to the 
likeness of his own genial nature. His idea of the kingdom 
of God is the common prophetic belief, though adapted and 
enlarged by the genius of humanity within him. His notion 
of the Son of man comes, partly, from Daniel, and, partly, 
from Enoch. His conception of the suffering Messiah was 
directly suggested by Isaiah's Servant of God. In the 
Psalms can be found his ideas that the true worship of the 
Father is to be not by sacrifice and ceremonial, but in 
spirit and in truth, by men of clean hands and contrite 
hearts. His notion that God's people are the pure and holy 
in spirit came from Jeremiah. His doctrine of repentance 
was Ezekiel's. His idea of God's forbearance with the 
wicked and desire to save them only repeated and expanded 
Hosea's. His ethical temper was inspired by the Books 
of the Hebrew Wisdom and their Apocryphal successors. 
Some of his individual and most characteristic precepts, 
such as the love of one's neighbour, or the law of reciprocity, 
were commonplaces in the Jewish schools, certain to be 
frequent on the lips of men who loved learning and revered 
the rabbi. And as he has his antecedents in Israel, so has 
the literature which preserves his memory. The Gospels 
are the creations of men who knew the Old Testament, and 
found again its most miraculous histories in the life of him 
who had in their eyes fulfilled it. The things that were 
possible to Moses, the wonders that had been worked by 
Elijah, the translation of Enoch, the deliverance accorded 
to Jonah, were occurrences which the regretful admiration 
of simple-minded disciples could not refuse to ascribe to 
him whom they had come to conceive as the most marvel- 
lous and winsome of the sons of men. 



12 THE PROBLEM OF THE GOSPELS 

' The secondary stratum in the Gospels has thus been 
formed by the very same influences that shaped the figure 
which is embedded in the primary. The associations created 
by the only literature which their authors knew, made at once 
the atmosphere through which they saw Jesus, the attributes 
in which they arrayed him, and the categories under which he 
was conceived. Hence came the miracles which they ascribed 
to him, his supernatural birth, his sacrificial death, and the 
ascension which translated him from a guilty world to the 
right hand of God. In a word, their imaginations, touched 
by the enthusiasm of an all-believing love, became creative ; 
and, losing the very power to distinguish between the things 
that had happened and the things that might, or rather that 
ought to, have happened, they saw Jesus as if he had been 
the Messiah they had hoped he was. They dreamed in the 
language of the Messianic hope, and when they attempted 
to describe him, their dreams so mingled with the realities 
that the realities partook of the idealism of the dreams, and 
the dreams absorbed the realism of the realities. Thus by 
a perfectly natural process one who had been in actual life 
a Hebrew peasant, though indeed a peasant of superlative 
genius, supernal goodness, and ineffable charm, came to 
wear to the imagination a divine hue and form ; and once 
this had been achieved for him it needed only the fearless 
logic of a metaphysical but unscientific age to identify him 
with Deity and resolve his humanity by the incarnation 
of the son of God.' 

§ III. Why there is a Problem of the Person 

I. But now what precisely is this double argument of 
rational logic and analytical criticism worth? Is it not 
cogent simply because it is narrow ? The conclusion of the 
dialectic is invincible for the reason that it started from an 
inarticulated premiss. The rational problem is not so simple 



THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY 13 

as the argument assumed, for the facts to be co-ordinated 
and the ideas to be construed are infinitely more complex 
than the premiss was allowed to state or to suggest. The 
dexterous logician is not the only strong intellect which has 
tried to handle the doctrine. The contradictions which he 
translates into rational incredibilities must either have 
escaped the analysis of men like Augustine or Aquinas, or 
have been by their thought transcended and reconciled in 
some higher synthesis. It is a wholesome thing to remember 
that the men who elaborated our theologies were at least as 
rational as their critics, and that we owe it to historical 
truth to look at their beliefs with their eyes. 

And as with the dialectical, so with the critical process : 
the two are related by having a common premiss ; and 
if it be insufficient or invalid in the one case, it cannot be 
beyond question in the other. Thus it is possible that 
the secondary element in the Gospels may be due rather 
to intellectual prevision than to imaginative reminiscence. 
We have not solved, we have not even stated and defined, 
the problem as to the person of Christ when we have 
written the life of Jesus, for that problem is raised even 
less by the Gospels than by Christ's place and function in 
the collective history of man ; or, to be more correct, by 
the life described in the Gospels and the phenomena repre- 
sented by universal history viewed in their reciprocal and 
interpretative inter-relations. If the Gospels stood alone, 
the problem would be comparatively simple ; indeed, there 
would hardly be anything worth calling a problem, for they 
are concerned with events which happened in time, and with 
an historical figure whose antecedents, emergence, circum- 
stances, behaviour, experiences, fate, words, are exactly the 
sort of material biography loves to handle. But the very 
essence of the matter is that the Gospels do not stand 
alone, but live, as it were, embosomed in universal history. 
And in that history Christ plays a part much more 1 re- 



14 WHAT CREATED CHRISTIANITY 

markable and much less compatible with common manhood 
than the part Jesus plays in the history of His own age and 
people. And we have not solved, or even apprehended, any 
one of the problems connected with His person until we 
have resolved the mystery of the place He has filled and 
the things He has achieved in the collective life of man. 

2. We have granted that it were an easy thing to construe 
the life of Jesus, isolated from its historical context, in the 
terms of a severe naturalism ; indeed, the ease with which 
it can be done makes it the first temptation of the intellect, 
which is as naturally indolent as it is instinctively audacious. 
But suppose our rigorous naturalism has done its work r 
what then ? Why, we have come face to face with a new 
problem, which may well seem all the more mysteriously 
insoluble that our naturalism is courageous and complete. 
For Christ has to be fitted into our scheme of things, and we 
have to explain (i) How He whom we have resolved into a 
mere Jewish peasant, came to be arrayed in the most extra- 
ordinary attributes which were ever made to clothe mortal 
man ; (2) how His historical action has corresponded to His 
fictitious rather than to His real character ; and (3) what 
sort of blind accident or ironical indifference to right can 
reign in a universe which has allowed to fiction greater 
powers than have been granted to truth. The question does 
not relate simply to the apotheosis of Jesus ; that is a pro- 
cess which the indolent intellect, if it be also ingenious, can 
facilely describe. We admit that the process may be stated 
in terms of such amazing verisimilitude as to turn it into a 
cogent probability. The question becomes urgent only when 
the deificatory process has been completed. The deification, 
if we may so call it, though the term is radically incorrect, 
has all the effect of the most finely calculated purpose formed 
after all the needs of man and the whole course of his his- 
tory have been considered. There is nothing in nature or art 
that can so well illustrate design or adaptation to an end. 



ILLUSION OR WHAT? 15 

And though it be illusory, yet it works not as illusion, but as 
truth, and for it, in a most miraculous way ; true men receive 
it, are made truer by it, so use it as to build the world up in 
the love and pursuit of the truth as it had never been built up 
before. As unconscious fiction it is as void of substance as 
a dream, yet it acts upon humanity as if it were the most 
substantial good which had ever descended upon it out of 
heaven. And how, by what right, at whose instance, did 
this thing, the apotheosis of the obscure, happen ? For it is 
the apotheosis which has proved the real or substantive factor 
of change. It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so power- 
fully entered into history ; it is the deified Christ who has 
been believed, loved, and obeyed as the Saviour of the world. 
The act or process of apotheosis, then, created the Chris- 
tian religion ; and who was responsible for it ? If the imagi- 
native peasants of Galilee, they were doing a deed no less 
wonderful than the creation of the world, and the power or 
providence which allowed them to do it was consenting by 
fiction and make-believe to govern reason and form character. 
But what kind of reflexion is it upon the Maker and 
Master of the universe if we conceive Him as consenting to 
do this thing ? Nay, in what sort of light does it set reason 
if we imagine it capable of being so deluded and deceived, 
seduced to martyrdom or compelled to enthusiasm by a 
mistake? Indeed, if the doctrine of the Person of Christ 
were explicable as the mere mythical apotheosis of Jesus of 
Nazareth, it would become the most insolent and fateful 
anomaly in history. For it could not stand alone ; it would 
affect all thought and all objects of thought. " Here," men 
would say, " a mere chapter of accidents has made one of the 
meanest figures in literature the most potent person of all 
time, the source of a series of illusions which have exercised 
the most transcendent influence upon the life and destinies 
of men. If accident and illusion have played such a part in 
history, what character must we attribute to the power which 



1 6 CHRIST IS IN HISTORY 

rules the world ? Order in nature is an insignificant idea 
compared with the idea of order in history ; but how can 
there be an order if the persons who create it be, in the very 
degree that they are potent, themselves the mere creatures of 
chance, or of worse than chance, fiction and pure phantasy?" 

3. We may say, then, that the doctrine of the Person of 
Christ is no mere theory concerning an historical individual 
with whose biography we are all familiar. On the contrary, 
its attributes are those in an even higher degree of a symbol 
than of a fact, though of a symbol which owes all its reality 
to its being fact transfigured and sublimed. In other words, 
Christ's person is even more intellectually real than histori- 
cally actual, i.e. it does not simply denote a figure which 
once appeared under the conditions of space and time, but it 
also stands for a whole order of thought, a way of regarding 
the universe, of conceiving God and man in themselves and 
in their mutual relations. Its interpretation, therefore, is not 
a problem in mere formal logic or limited literary criticism ; 
but touches at once facts of history and the ultimate mys- 
teries of being. We may, then, make here a perfunctory 
distinction, and say that it raises two series of questions : 
historical or literary, and speculative or philosophical. The 
historical problem is threefold, concerned, first, with the life 
of Jesus of Nazareth ; secondly, with the process by which 
the thought of His people regarding Him developed from 
the synoptic Gospels into the conceptions that needed for 
their expression the formulae of the oecumenical creeds ; and, 
thirdly, with the mode in which the Person as represented 
in the history and interpreted in the doctrine has created a 
religion which has absorbed the noblest elements out of the 
past, and been the most potent factor of moral and intel- 
lectual progress that has ever entered into the life of man. 

But the speculative problem is at once more simple and 
less soluble, viz., in what terms must we state our idea of the 
order in which He stands, of His place within the order, and 



AS GOD IS IN NATURE 17 

of the qualities or right by which He holds it. Now, it is 
evident that every attempt to solve the former problem must 
be incomplete without some attempt at the solution of the 
latter ; for a person who fulfils universal functions cannot be 
described and dismissed as if He were a particular indi- 
vidual. In other words, the secret of such a personality is 
not explained when historical science and literary art have 
combined to tell in the most adequate and exhaustive way 
the story of the life He lived at a given moment in a given 
place, and of how He was conceived in ages of imaginative 
faith and metaphysical enthusiasm ; but only when such a 
coherent conception of Him is reached as shall show Him 
in organic relation to the whole system of things. Now, 
whatever we may think of the oecumenical formulae, we must 
acknowledge that their purpose was to make Christ repre- 
sent in His person the natures, relations, inter-activities, 
community and difference in attribute and being, of God and 
man. They may have in many respects done violence to 
both speculation and logic ; but one thing we must confess : 
if the idea they tried to express as to Christ's person had 
not been formulated centuries since, we should have been 
forced to invent it, or something like it, in order that we 
might have some reasonable hypothesis explanatory of the 
course things have taken. And this, we may add, means 
that the problem is neither dead nor concerned with the 
recovery of a world of dead ideas, but one of living actuality, 
concerned with all that is most vital and characteristic in the 
thought of to-day. 

Now, this defines our purpose, which may be stated thus : to 
discuss the question as to the Person of Christ, what He was, 
and how He ought to be conceived, not simply as a chapter in 
Biblical or in systematic theology, but as a problem directly 
raised by the place He holds and the functions He has ful- 
filled in the life of Man, collective and individual. The 
principle which underlies the discussion we may further state 

P.C.R. 2 



18 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

in these terms : the conception of Christ stands related to 
history as the idea of God is related to Nature, i.e. each is 
in its own sphere the factor of order, or the constitutive 
condition of a rational system. The study of nature has 
been the means of unfolding, explicating, and denning the 
contents of the idea of God ; the study of history has de- 
veloped, amplified and justified the conception of Christ. 
We hope that this statement may in the course of the dis- 
cussions which follow become something more and better 
than a paradox. 

Of course, a too timid faith may doubt whether it be pious 
to regard the Person of Christ as in any proper sense a fit 
subject for philosophical discussion ; and it may urge that, 
as the knowledge of it came by revelation, it is only as a 
revealed truth, attested and authenticated by inspired men, 
that it ought to be accepted and understood. The only 
proper method of elucidation and proof is the exegesis of 
the sacred Scriptures, while the precise sense in which it is 
to be construed has been defined by the great councils of 
the undivided Church. The Incarnation is a mystery which 
transcends reason, and it can enter into the categories of 
metaphysical criticism only to be mishandled, profaned and 
misjudged. 

But to this it may be sufficient to reply : it does not lie in 
the power of any man or any society to keep the mysteries of 
faith out of the hands of reason. Nature and history, the 
very necessities of belief and its continued life, have com- 
bined to invite reason to enter the domain of faith. The 
only condition on which reason could have nothing to do 
with religion, is that religion should have nothing to do with 
truth. For in every controversy concerning what is or what 
is not truth, reason and not authority is the supreme arbiter ; 
the authority that decides against reason commits itself to 
a conflict which is certain to issue in its defeat. ' The men 



AND THE REASON OF MAN 19 

who defend faith must think as well as the men who 
oppose it ; their argumentative processes must be rational 
and their conclusions supported by rational proofs. If it 
were illicit for reason to touch the mysteries of religion, the 
Church would never have had a creed or have believed a 
doctrine, nor would man have possessed a faith higher than 
the mythical fancies which pleased his childhood. Without 
the exercise of reason we should never have had the Fourth 
Gospel or the Pauline Epistles, or any one of those treatises 
on the Godhead, the Incarnation, or the Atonement, from 
Athanasius to Hegel, or from Augustine to our own day, 
which have done more than all the decrees of all the Coun- 
cils, or all the Creeds of all the Churches, to keep faith living 
and religion a reality. The man who despises or distrusts 
the reason despises the God who gave it, and the most 
efficient of all the servants He has bidden work within and 
upon man in behalf of truth. Here, at least, it may be 
honestly said there is no desire to build Faith upon the 
negation of Reason ; where both are sons of God it were 
sin to seek to make the one legitimate at the expense of the 
other's legitimacy. 



BOOK I 

QUESTIONS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 

AND MIND WHICH AFFECT BELIEF IN 

THE SUPERNATURAL PERSON 



II n'y a point d'autre nature, je veux dire d'autres Iois naturelles, 
que les volontes efficaces du tout-puissant. 

Dieu est tres-etroitement uni a nos ames par sa presence, de sorte 
qu'on peut dire qu'il est le lien des esprits, de meme que les espaces 
sont en un sens le lien des corps. — Malebranche. 

Quid enim est natura nisi iste ordo, secundum quem Deus suas 
creaturas regit ? — La FORGE. 

Nee sineret bonus fieri male, nisi omnipotens etiam de malo facere 
posset bene.— Augustine. 

Von der Idee entfremdet, ist die Natur nur der Leichnam des 
Verstandes. — Hegel. 

Die wahre Philosophic der Geschichte besteht namlich in der 
Einsicht, dass man, bei alien diesen endlosen Veranderungen und 
ihrem Wirrwarr, doch stets nur das selbe, gleiche und unwandelbare 
Weseri" vor sich hat, welches heute das Selbe treibt, wie gestern und 
immerdar: sie soil also das Identische in alien Vorgangen, der alten wie 
der neuen Zeit, des Orients wie des Occidents, erkennen, und, trotz aller 
Verschiedenheit der speciellen Umstande, der Kostiimes und der Sitten, 
iiberall die Selbe Menschheit erblicken. 

Was die Vernunft dem Individuo, das ist die Geschichte dem 
menschlichen Geschlechte. — Schopenhauer. 

Gleichwie die mancherlei Blumen alle in der Erde stehen und alle 
neben einander wachsen, keine beisst sich mit der andern um Farben, 
Geruch und Geschmack, sie lassen Erde und Sonne, Regen und Wind, 
Hitze und Kalte mit sich machen was sie wollen, sie aber wachsen eine 
jede in ihrer Eigenschaft, so ists auch mit den Kindern Gottes. — 
Jacob Bohme. 

Es liegt wesentlich im Begriffe der wahrhaften Religion, d. i. 
derjenigen, deren Inhalt der absolute Geist ist, dass sie geoffenbart 
und zwar von Gott geoffenbart sei. — Hegel. 



CHAPTER I 

THE BELIEF AS A PROBLEM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF 

NATURE 

§ I. The Ideas of Nature and the Supernatural 

THE real and initial difficulty the modern mind feels in 
the face of the apostolic doctrine as to the Person of 
Christ is its radical incompatibility with the scientific view 
of Nature. It was an easy thing to men who had no con- 
ception of natural order or law, and who habitually thought 
in the terms of the miraculous, to say, "We believe in a super- 
natural Person." Their view of the universe was not, in our 
sense, normal, but was rather a compound of the extra- 
ordinary and exceptional. Natural things were explained by 
supernatural causes ; gods were as numerous as men ; dreams 
had more significance than observation or experience ; the 
commonest events were ascribed to Divine interference; while 
to seek a physical reason for disease or health, or states 
of ecstasy or trance, was regarded as highly profane. But 
the instinctive faith of the modern temper may be ex- 
pressed in the formula, 'UL_believe in an order that admits 
no miracle and knows no supernatural." Nature is to us the 
realm of law ; we suspect the abnormal, and tend to deny 
promptly whatever postulates for its being a force we cannot 
analyze or measure. The creed common to modern man we 
might describe by the word " Naturalism," were not the term 
so illusory and so incapable of a fixed meaning. In a sense, 
we are all Naturalists ; we speak and think as those who live 
and move and have their being in a nature which represents 



*/ 



24 THE ORDER OF NATURE 

to us all we know of reality and life. For the Nature we 
describe as dead is a mere abstraction, without any being in 
our conscious experience. Spinoza distinguished " natura 
naturans," from " natura naturata " : the former was causa- 
tive, creative, efficient nature, the latter nature as caused, 
created, produced. But the distinction was subjective and 
arbitrary ; it represented no objective reality. We do not 
know this " natura naturata " by itself ; it is the " natura 
naturans " viewed as a realized or embodied order. Nor are 
we able to separate the "naturans," from the "naturata," for 
it is only the system we know conceived through the causal 
idea, a system charged with the energies which as efficient 
are the sufficient reason for its continuance. But whether we 
think of" Nature " as causative or as caused, what we mean is 
a system whose reason is in itself, which would be disturbed 
or broken up by the intervention of any higher power or will, 
superseding its forces and accomplishing something beyond 
their capacity or scope. So universal and instinctive has 
this notion become that we feel as if a supernatural Person — 
especially in so exaggerated a form as we have in Jesus 
Christ — were an idea we could as little conceive in thought 
as represent in imagination. 

2. This is too great a question to be argued as if it con- 
cerned the old and exhausted commonplaces as to the possi- 
bility and credibility of miracles. There never was a more 
unreal discussion raised in any School, or by men who had less 
right to raise it. Hume was a dexterous dialectician, and in 
nothing was his dexterity so apparent as in the way in which 
he concealed, if not from himself, at least from his opponents, 
the incompatibility of his argument against miracles with 
the first principles of his own philosophy. That philosophy 
was the purest and most consistent of all modern scepticisms, 
and Hume was the most subtle and logical of all modern 
empiricists. His apparatus was simple, his analysis of the 
material contained in Locke's two sources of knowledge was 



IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUME 25 

thorough, and his deduction complete. The originals of all 
knowledge were two — impressions and ideas. Impressions 
denoted the direct and vivid appearance of Nature in and 
through sense ; while ideas were remembered impressions, — as 
it were their faint echo or image. 'Now,' Hume argues, 'since 
these two are the sources and only realities of knowledge, and 
since we never find ourselves without an impression or idea, we 
have no independent existence, and are nothing but the series 
of our impressions and ideas. It follows that as we — or the 
succession of images we mistake for ourselves — can never 
have impressions of more than single things, we can never 
have any impression of self, which, so far from being a single 
thing, is an infinite multitude of things existing in either 
arbitrary or determined relations. It further follows that 
as we perceive only external occurrence and not internal 
causation, we can never have any impression of cause or 
perceive anything more than antecedence and sequence or the 
coexistence and association of contiguous things. But where 
we have no impressions we can have no ideas ; and there- 
fore we cannot speak of causation or causes as real things. 
Nor, for the same reason, can we have any impression or any 
consequent idea of so vast a thing as space, or of so multi- 
tudinous a thing as time. The ideas of self, causation, space, 
time are, therefore, all unrealities, begotten of the tendency 
to feign, i.e. they are mere fictions of the phantasy. All the 
knowledge that comes to man is given in individual impres- 
sions, and all that legitimately remains is the echo of these 
in single or associated ideas.' 

Now let us take the principles supplied by this method and 
apply them to the ideas or beliefs which underlie Hume's famous 
argument against miracles. Miracles, he says, have two things 
against them : (a) they are impossible, for they imply a 
violation of the order or the laws ot nature, and (/?) they are 
incredible because they contradict our human experience. 
Well, then, could the first argument stand against Hume's 



I 



26 HUME DEFIES HIS OWN LOGIC 

own method of criticism? Let us begin with the idea of Nature. 
Where did we get it ? and what does it mean ? Had we 
ever an impression of Nature ? How could we have it ? We 
may have an impression of single things, say, of cold, of 
heat, of taste, of smell, of light, of sound. But Nature is 
not a single thing, but rather the vast, multifarious, complex 
aggregate of all real and possible perceptions ; it is, therefore,, 
not capable of being the object or occasion of an impression, 
and so it can only be by an entirely illicit process that we 
form the fictitious idea of Nature as a connected and co- 
herent whole. How then can we say that Nature is ? Still 
more how can we tell what Nature is ? Can we even by 
analysis tell the immense number of things which the term 
Nature means ? It is (a) the total infinite multitude of those 
impressions which make up the world without us, whose 
cause no man can discover ; (/3) the whole army of associated 
ideas within, which we mistake for ourselves, but which is only 
a stream, or series, or succession of units in perpetual flux, 
moving and changing with inconceivable rapidity ; and (7) it 
is all these unresolved but associated units bound into a sys- 
tem by some unintelligible principle in some inexplicable 
mode. There can be no such thing, therefore, as an idea 
of Nature, for of Nature we can have no impression, and 
what is so named is only an accidental aggregation of ideas. 
Hence, all reasoning based upon the notion of Nature as a 
known thing or system of things is illicit. 

But let us see whether the idea of Order will fare any better 
in the hands of this criticism : can we have any impression of 
it? Here difficulties of another kind meet us : for order im- 
plies time and its sequences. And so to have a notion of 
order we must be ourselves continuous ; but we are on 
Hume's premisses without any permanent personal identity, 
nothing indeed but a momentary taste or fragrance, an 
affection of heat or cold, a sensation of colour or resistance ; 
in a word, only a series of impressions and ideas, with no 



AND DENIES MIRACLES 27 

existence save such as they can give. If, then, we are to 
receive an impression of order, we must have the whole 
infinite series summed up in one single sensation, which would 
imply a sensory as vast as the universe. As the thing is so 
manifestly impossible we can have no conception of order, 
and, therefore, cannot reason as if we had. Again, take 
another term in Hume's argument, Violation ; but how can we 
have a conception of violated order if we have no notion of 
the order said to be violated, any more than we can have 
any conception of Nature or Self, when both nature and self 
have been dissolved ? Therefore, to argue that miracles are 
a violation of the order or laws of Nature, is to assume a 
multitude of ideas which experience has been proved incap- 
able of giving, and psychology unable by any analytical pro- 
cess to discover, leaving as the only possible conclusion the 
assumption that man first gave them to Nature. The result 
is that Hume's argument is so fundamentally opposed to his 
own first principles in philosophy as to be broken, split, and 
ended by the very criticism he himself brought to bear upon 
personal identity, upon causation, upon space, upon time, 
upon the very ideas on which his argument against miracles 
rests, and which gave to it all its apparent validity. 

§11. Nature and Thought 

I. But it were altogether inconsistent with the gravity of the 
discussion on which we are entering, to conduct it as a mere 
argumentum ad hominem against a man who confessed that 
he did- not live up to his own philosophy. It is evident, 
indeed, that a position so a priori and final as this, that we 
live under an order or system which has no room for a super- 
natural Person, must be discussed as a principle involved in 
the most fundamental of all questions, viz., in what terms 
must we interpret this order or system ? What does Nature 
mean and what include? Does man make it, or does it 



/ 



28 NATURE DOES NOT INTERPRET MAN 

make man ? Is thought the product of experience, or is 
experience made possible by factors which transcend it? 
These are radical questions, as old as the attempt to explain 
all that we mean by the term Knowledge, its genesis and 
conditions, its limits and reality ; and they may seem as in- 
soluble as they are ancient. But it does not follow that the 
more fundamental a problem becomes the less soluble it 
grows, or that, though perhaps beyond a final speculative 
solution, it is incapable of a rational answer. And the funda- 
mental character of these questions is seen in the way in 
which they determine all our thinking, our attitude to what 
is termed Nature, our interpretation of the phenomena we 
-call History. For what they really mean is this — whether 
we are to find the ultimate factors of knowledge in per- 
sonality or in the impersonal forces we co-ordinate under 
the phrase " system or order of nature." The intellectual 
result will indeed be very different as we make Nature 
or Thought the ultimate term in our logical process. If 
" Nature," taken in the sense of the system of forces that 
surround us, be conceived as the method and the measure 
for the interpretation of man, it means that he is to be con- 
strued as part of a universe which knows antecedence and 
sequence, but not rational causation, i.e. it is a universe of 
co-ordinated phenomena, not of connected and intelligible 
being. In such a system man may be conceived as a succes- 
sion of similar or dissimilar states of consciousness, but -not 
as a concrete and coherent person, i.e. a continuous and self- 
identical being. The successive conscious states which he 
may identify with himself, will be governed by forces 
operating from without and independently of what he may 
call himself, i.e. the conscious states which he is pleased to 
regard as constituting the only personality he knows, will 
represent the action of forces he does not know. He thus 
becomes in the strict sense not a cause, but an effect or 
result ; his concrete and conscious being, his character and 



MAN INTERPRETS NATURE 29 

mind, appear as the creations of powers and circumstances 
which he can neither discover nor name, though he must 
conceive them as necessitating; yet to say that they were 
necessitated would be to transcend experience. His thoughts, 
his feelings, and his actions are thus regulated by laws as 
absolute as those which determine the ebb and flow of the 
tides, the movement of the planets or of the stars, the mould- 
ing of the tear or of the dewdrop. 

But if Nature be thus used for the interpretation of man, 
two things follow. First, the man who emerges from this 
speculative process is not the man we know, i.e. he is not 
a free and conscious reason who can act from choice and for 
an end he can state in terms now moral, now intellectual, 
now emotional, and who even distinguishes himself as a 
person from the things, events, and circumstances amid which 
he moves. And, secondly, the Nature which is invoked to 
explain him ceases herself to be intelligible, is without any 
explicable relation to the intellect, and has nothing rational 
either in her order or in her phenomena. There is, indeed, 
no single idea on which science prides herself which could be 
received from Nature alone ; for even if mind were regarded 
as a simple receptivity, a mere tabula rasa or sheet of white 
paper, it would be necessary to invest it with the power of 
reading the things that are written upon its clean or figured 
surface ; and the power to read implies what we may term 
the whole grammar of natural intelligence. For the thing 
written is something which conveys thought to thought ; i.e. 
it is a language which one mind speaks and another mind 
understands: 

But to a language three things are necessary : it must 
express reason, contain reason, and speak to reason. If 
thought did not make it, thought could never interpret it, for 
nothing but the work of thought is intelligible to thought. 
But thought is the most distinctive attribute and exercise of 
personality ; only in a person does it originate, and only by a 



30 MIND: ESSE EST PERCIPERE 

person can it be understood. For how an intelligible can be 
without an intelligence, both creative and receptive, is a thing 
which experience does not know and thought cannot conceive. 
If, then, we eliminate Personality from Nature — either objec- 
tively, as interpretable ; or subjectively, as interpreted — we are 
left without a nature we can regard as intelligible. Person- 
ality thus becomes the very condition through which Nature, 
as known to science, is, while it is also the factor through 
which all the sciences which explain Nature have come to be 
and are able to continue in being. But the organ through 
which all natural forces are known cannot be itself a mere 
unit of force ; i.e. the co-ordinating genius cannot be one of 
the co-ordinated atoms. In other words, the Personality 
which makes Nature was not made by the Nature it makes. 

2. But in order that the position so summarily stated may 
appear to be not without reason, and that the drift and pur- 
pose of the argument which is to be built upon it may be 
made more apparent, it will be necessary to attempt a more 
detailed discussion of the relations between Personality and 
Nature as factors of the intelligible which Nature constitutes 
and Personality interprets. We are accustomed to distinguish 
Nature as the realm of necessity from Personality as the seat 
of freedom. We conceive uniformity to be the note of the one, 
but reason and will to be the notes of the other. What is 
termed causation reigns in Nature, where the law of antece- 
dence and sequence is held to be invariable ; but Personality 
is itself a cause ; i.e. it has the power of initiative or of break- 
ing into the sequences which Nature follows, but can neither 
interrupt nor evade. Now what relation exists between the 
Personality which is conceived as thought or reason, as 
freedom or will, and the Nature which is conceived as uni- 
form and necessitated ? Or, to express our question other- 
wise, Can what we term Nature exist without the Person- 
ality which construes it, and, in a sense, constitutes it ? 

Now certain things may here be said to be perfectly 



NATURE: ESSE EST PERCIPI 31 

obvious, for it will be conceded that they are due to the 
modification of the senses through which we hold intercourse 
with the outer world. We refer to the psychology of those 
qualities which are regarded as peculiarly secondary, like 
colour. The eye distinguishes objects by their special colours 
or distinctive hues, and we speak as if these colours inhered 
in the things themselves, and were quite independent of the 
spectator. But subtract the man who looks at the objects, 
and what would become of their hues and colours ? Here, 
for example, stand three men ; in the centre is one with the 
eye of the artist, sensitive to every shade and delicacy of 
hue, finding variety where men with a less sensitive organ 
can see only sameness. But on his right hand stands a 
man whose reds are all green, whose yellows are all browns, 
or to whom all colours appear only as a sort of yellowish 
white ; and we ask, why Nature wears such a different com- 
plexion to him from what it possesses to the artist, and we 
are told that he is colour-blind. Again, on the left hand 
stands a man who can take no part in the controversy, for he 
is blind, and to him colours are not ; and were we to ask 
him what scarlet is like, he might reply in the language 
of the blind man in Locke, that it is like the sound of a 
trumpet. Colour then does not inhere in things ; Nature 
by herself is without it. It is there because man is there, 
possessed of the sense by which it is not simply perceived, 
but, in a sense, constituted. 

But what is true of colour is no less true of sound. We 
may think of it as the result of purely natural causes, con- 
cerning in an equal degree the physicist who speculates 
about energy, and the physiologist who studies the senses 
in relation to the external world. If we ask the physicist, 
he will explain the mode of its transmission ; he will draw 
a parallel between the movement of light and of sound, 
and theorize as to the length of the wave by which they 
travel, or the rapidity by which the waves of sound move 



32 THOUGHT GIVES TO NATURE 

from the place of origin to the tympanum on which they 
break. But how far can he carry us ? How much does 
he explain ? Here again stand three men. One man has 
the sensitive ear of the musician. He listens to the oratorio 
and can detect each separate instrument in the orchestra, 
tell whether it be well or ill played, and what it contributes 
to the collective harmony ; he can note the tones of each 
singer's voice, and, as he hears the wonderful march of the 
music, he can combine into a whole the world that had 
moved in the master's mind. He sees, through his hearing as 
it were, the mortified anger and shame of the defeated priests 
of Baal and the mocking laughter of the prophet ; the 
mustering of angelic hosts ; the tramp of disciplined armies ; 
the gathering of the dead to the sound of the last trump ; 
the agony and infinite yearning of the soul that cries to God 
out of the depths ; and the jubilant and exulting speech of 
the spirit that stands justified before the Eternal Judge. 
Not a sound escapes him, and out of their harmonies come 
visions and dreams such as only the master can create and 
the soul of the sensitive disciple can see. But on his right 
hand stands a man who listens with impatience or doubt 
or bewilderment. These instruments to him make but 
a jangling of confused sounds ; the voices that rise and 
fall and tremble in song have less significance than if they 
had been lifted in prosaic speech. The enthusiasm of his 
neighbour is to him extravagant and foolish ; his call for 
admiration seems sheer impertinence ; the whole thing is 
utter weariness and distress. What is the matter ? In 
current phrase, the man has no ear. He knows sound, he 
can interpret speech ; but music has for him no charm, or 
even any being. While the man on the right hand so feels, 
what of the man on the left? His face is a blank ; he looks 
round curiously but without any sign of intelligence ; he 
watches faces that teach him nothing, and he only knows 
from gesture and action thai; there is proceeding between the 



WHAT SENSE PERCEIVES IN NATURE 33 

other two a discussion in which he can take no part. Their 
controversy concerns a point on which he cannot adjudicate, 
for he has heard no sound ; he is deaf. And what does this 
total difference of attitude to what we regard as the physi- 
cal phenomena of sound mean but this — that sound is not 
without but within man ; that he can educe sounds from 
the waves which have been set in motion by the vibrating 
body, and can weave them into harmonies such as Nature 
never made, speaking of things more glorious than the heart 
of Nature could have conceived or imagined ? And he is able 
to do this and to compel Nature to lend him the means of 
doing it, because it is only through him and his power to 
interpret and to combine them that all the factors and 
conditions of sound are realized. 

And we could go from sense to sense, from ear and eye to 
taste and smell, and by analysis enlarge and confirm the 
conclusion that the qualities which our senses perceive are 
not things merely of external Nature ; but that either they 
could not be or could not seem to be without the constitutive 
faculty or the interpretative Personality of man. In other 
words, Nature in her own right is, if not a void, yet at most 
a mere aggregate of mechanical properties ; her pomp and 
beauty, her voice and all her harmonies she owes to Mind. 
We receive from her what we have given to her, and without 
us she would not be what she is. 

3. But it must not be supposed that this argument avails 
only as regards the qualities we term secondary. There is no 
conception so necessary to the modern idea of Nature as 
that of Energy, for without it no change and no continuity 
would be possible. For Nature would be simply an inert, un- 
moved, and unmovable mass, if indeed, to our modern way of 
thinking, these terms do not denote ideas too contradictory to 
be placed together. Energy is the cause, and its convertibility 
the form, of all physical changes. It is held to be constant in 
quantity, indestructible and persistent in essence, but infinitely 

P.C.R. 3 



34 ENERGY KNOWN IN NATURE 

varied in mode : while ever changing its form, it yet never 
ceases to be capable at once of a permutation which knows 
no rest, and a continuance which knows no break. But there 
is a question which underlies all our reasoning concerning the 
behaviour and permanence of energy ; to wit, how do we come 
by the idea of it ? This does not simply mean, what evidence 
have we for the existence of force ? but rather this : how can 
we think, nay, why must we think, that there is in Nature 
that power of doing work which we name Energy ? If we 
explain it by our experience of resistance, — i.e. by our know- 
ledge that whenever we exercise effort there is something 
without that resists us, presses against us, overcomes our effort, 
or is overcome by it,— what does this theory as to the origin 
of the idea mean ? Does it not signify that in order to the 
knowledge of energy without we must posit free power within ? 
If we could not put forth effort we could never meet resistance ; 
the energy that resists would therefore remain unknown. But 
is not this to argue that we know causation, because we are 
ourselves causes ; and that it is through our own power of 
acting that the notion that Nature has power to act is gained 
and formed ? It means that we derive the notion of energy 
from our own conscious freedom, — that the idea of causation 
in Nature is a clear, or even inevitable, deduction from Will ? 
In other words, a world of necessitated beings could not form 
or conceive the notion of energy ; for the very experiences that 
make the notion of it possible, the faculties to which it could 
be presented, and in whose terms it could be represented, 
would be absent ; and such thought as there was would be 
too purely mechanical — i.e. too unconscious of any power that 
could be exercised within and resisted without, — to be able to 
conceive a universe whose surest datum was the consciousness 
of "Matter, Motion, and Force." If, then, we speak of Energy 
and attempt to interpret Nature through it, what are we doing 
but constituting Nature in the terms of Personality, using what 
is given within as the key to open the mysteries or reveal the 



BECAUSE FREEDOM IS IN MAN 35 

realities which exist without? We conclude, therefore, that 
Energy in Nature is the correlate of Freedom in man ; and 
were he not free, he could neither think nor speak of energy, 
for he would be without the intellectual powers needed for 
its recognition or discovery. 

4. But secondary qualities like colour and sound, or special 
and definite conceptions like causation, whether represented 
by physics as energy, or by metaphysics as will or cause, 
are not the only sort of terms which Personality supplies 
for the interpretation of Nature ; it supplies also what is even 
more fundamental — the forms under which we perceive the 
phenomena which, we may say, constitute the many-featured 
face it turns towards our senses, and the categories through 
which it becomes intelligible to our thought. We have 
already argued, in effect, that the intelligibility of Nature 
implies both an intelligence through which it is, and an intel- 
lect to which it is, the one creative, the other interpretative, 
of the thought embodied in Nature. The real world of the 
intellect is, of course, the intelligible, and neither could exist 
without the other ; i.e. there could be no intellect without an 
intelligible ; no intelligible apart from the intellect. We may 
expand this proposition into a series of inferences which 
may be stated thus : (1) since the intellect can interpret 
Nature, Nature is intelligible ; (2) since Nature is intelligible, 
there must be some correspondence or correlation between 
its laws or methods and the rational processes in us ; (3) 
since there is this correlation between the intelligible world 
and the interpretative intellect, they must embody one and 
the same intelligence. What these terms respectively mean 
and what the argument aims at proving may be made ob- 
vious by an illustration. Language is capable of translation 
or interpretation by reason just in the degree that it expresses 
reason. The speech of the mad is ridiculous to the sane, the 
speech of the sane has no meaning to the mad. The traveller 
or missionary who discovers and settles among a hitherto 



36 NATURE A VISUAL LANGUAGE 

unknown tribe, may learn its tongue, however rudimentary and 
formless, may get to understand its beliefs and customs, its 
views of nature and life, however barbarous and uninformed ; 
but he can do so only so far as he finds in the savages a 
reason so akin to his own that he can stand, as it were, 
within the tribe's consciousness, and look out at the world 
through its eyes. Scholars of this century have, by the help 
of bilingual or trilingual inscriptions, recovered to historical 
and literary knowledge several long-forgotten languages ; but 
no ingenuity could have deciphered into literature or worked 
into history figures that were mere fortuitous scratchings, 
freaks of Nature, or accidental lines drawn by some wandering 
horde. So the very fact of the intelligibility of Nature, or the 
possibility of its interpretation by mind, means that it em- 
bodies or expresses intelligence, — is the medium or vehicle of 
ideas which the human intellect can discover and think as if 
they were its own. 

But this argument admits a further development. The 
human intellect could not live unless embosomed by a 
universe which was in its constitution and contents as rational 
as itself. Reason could not live in a world where no reason 
was. If the world became mad, if its physical forces were 
now conserved and now destroyed ; if continuity governed one 
day and accident the next ; if gravitation now ruled, and all 
rivers flowed to the sea and all lighter bodies fell towards the 
heavier ; if, again, levitation reigned, and the sea turned itself 
into the rivers, and rose above the mountains, and the heavier 
bodies flew away from the lighter — what would the effect of 
this mad world be on the sane mind ? Could mind in its 
presence maintain its sanity ? Or, to reverse the supposition, 
if the world were beautiful and orderly, a scene of grander 
order and higher law than we now know^it to be, but if all 
the men within and upon it were mad — would it be to them 
a sane world ? Would not their madness make its very 
sanity more mad and more vain than the worst insanity 



THE INTELLECT AND THE INTELLIGIBLE 37 

would be ? And does not this signify that we must have 
the correlation of the intellect and the intelligible before 
we can have either a rational mankind or any science of 
nature? But it signifies one thing more, viz., that the In- 
telligence which is embodied in this intelligible Nature, is 
in kind and quality one with the intelligence embodied in 
its interpreter. The Reason that lives in Nature, speaks a 
language that the reason personalized in man can under- 
stand and translate. The mathematics which have con- 
trolled and guided the Builder of the heavens, are identical 
with the mathematics which the astronomer in his study 
deduces from the idea of space given in his own thought, and 
which he proves by the processes of his own reason. If he 
looks at this fine correspondence from the subjective or 
dialectical side, he may say with Plato, " The Creator in His 
act of creation has geometrized"; but if he regard it from its 
objective or observational side, he will say with Kepler, " In 
reading the secrets of Nature I am thinking the thoughts of 
God after Him." But whether he speaks with Plato or with 
Kepler he means the same thing : there is such a corre- 
spondence between the mind and the universe, between the 
intelligible we think and the intellect we think by, that their 
relation can only be explained by identity of source, i.e. by 
both being expressions of a single supreme Intelligence. 

§ III. Mind and the Process of Creation 

The principle then which underlies the discussion so far 
as it has proceeded may be expressed thus : The problem 
of personal experience is one with the problem of universal 
existence ; and from this principle we have attempted to 
deduce the conclusion : the only postulate from which we 
can derive an intelligible Nature or a rational experience is 
thought. In other words, since we can conceive Nature only 
through the forms and in the categories supplied by the inter- 
pretative Personality, we are bound to infer that the Nature 



38 PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION NOT ORGANISMS 

which none but a personal Intellect can interpret, none but 
a personal Intelligence could create. 

I. But this conclusion supplies us with a premiss for a new 
discussion, and this discussion will as much concern the 
nature that the biologist interprets as our past discussions 
have concerned the nature that the physicist conceives. We 
may state the new premiss, which follows from the con- 
clusion of the previous argument, thus : The real Nature 
that needs to be explained is not the phenomenal, but the 
noumenal ; not the world which appears to reason, but the 
reason which organizes, into an intelligible whole, the world 
of appearances, making it real to experience through its 
reality to thought. The meaning of this principle is that 
the real problem of Evolution in the organic kingdom is the 
genesis and the development of mind as it is realized in 
the individual and has been exercised by the race. Certain 
masters of scientific exposition have written as if the serious 
problem of evolution concerned the origin and succession of 
living forms. They have thought it enough to prove the 
mutability of species, the parts played by the factors of 
organism and environment in the development of the powers 
that best fitted for success and survival in the struggle for 
life. It has been imagined that we could, by the comparison 
and correlation of forms, exhibit the process of their evolu- 
tion, or the mode and the order in which our planet came to 
be peopled with the busy tribes of flesh and blood. I raise 
no question as to the mode or as to the order ; what I do 
question is, whether a theory as to the evolution and the 
succession of biological forms has any claim to be regarded 
as a theory adequate to the explanation of the facts of the 
case ; i.e. to be considered a scientific hypothesis as to how 
the whole of nature, inclusive of every form and quality of 
life, came to be. 

The theory may indeed be described as essentially con- 
cerned with the creational mode rather than with the crea- 



BUT THE REASON WHICH ORGANIZES 39 

tional cause ; but the mode cannot exist without the energies 
or the forces that — operating either in the organism or the 
environment, or in both — accomplish the evolution. Indeed, 
the theory expressly proceeds upon the principle that the only 
forces it knows or reckons with are those called natural, though 
it conceives Nature in a strictly limited and exclusive sense. 
While, then, evolution, so far as it is a scientific doctrine, 
is a theory of the creational mode, yet where it is repre- 
sented as an adequate account of the history of life upon 
this planet, it becomes also a theory of the creational cause. 
The theory is thus philosophical as well as scientific ; and 
though the philosophy may be implicit, yet it never ceases to 
be both active and determinative in the science. The degree 
in which this is the case will become more obvious as we 
proceed. 

We may say that we understand evolution in the field of 
organic life to mean the emergence of such new organs or 
such a modification of old organs in the struggle for existence 
as secures the survival of the fittest, and through it the develop- 
ment of new species. We need not too curiously describe or 
consider the changes in Darwin's hypothesis by later and 
younger men of science like Weismann. It is enough to say 
that the more the process is simplified the more complex 
does it require the cause or the sufficient reason of the move- 
ment to be ; and the more urgent does the demand become 
that the action of the cause be immediate, continuous, uni- 
versal. The less we insist on the transmission of acquired 
characters, the more do we insist on the sufficiency of the 
more strictly natural and impersonal causes that are at work ; 
the less emphasis we lay on the achievement of the individual 
for the good of the whole, the more emphasis are we com- 
pelled to lay on the operation of the whole, and of the forces 
it represents on each and every individual. 

So far then as concerns our present discussion, there are in 
the theory three ideas or positions that must be noted — Cause, 



4 o NATURE EVOLVES THE INVOLVED 

Process, End. These terms may here be distinguished thus : 
" Cause " expresses the sufficient reason alike for the result 
achieved and the means necessary for its realization ; " Pro- 
cess " denotes the way or method in which this cause does 
its work ; while " End " means the collective result, not 
nature as it terminates in biological forms, but nature as 
it culminates in mind, and as it lives in the intelligence of 
man, with all its experience and all its history. The prob- 
lem, therefore, that arises is this : Are we able, by the pro- 
cess of an evolution, conducted strictly within the terms of 
Nature and by purely natural forces, to account for the origin 
of human reason and the history of all its achievements ? In 
other words, what evolution has to explain is not nature and 
life but Man and Mind and History. 

Now one thing is evident : the more severely natural the 
process is, the less can we allow anything to emerge in its 
course which is not really contained within the terms of 
the Nature which inaugurated the process, forms the bosom 
within which it proceeds and the energies which move it 
onward. What Nature evolves, Nature must have zVzvolved ; 
and to emphasize as natural both the process that leads to 
the end, and the end to which it leads, is to bind ourselves to 
find in the primary or causal term of the process the sufficient 
reason for all that follows. 

2. In working out the problem which has just been stated 
we may follow two methods which may be termed respectively 
the regressive and the egressive. The regressive method 
starts from the completed process and proceeds backward step 
by step in search of the factors and the forces which have 
produced the completion ; and this regressive movement can- 
not terminate till the sufficient reason or the ultimate cause 
be reached. If we follow the egressive method, we simply 
reverse the procedure, and reason downward from the begin- 
ning or assumed cause through its successive achievements to 
its ultimate issue. Let us take each method in succession. 



WHENCE IS MAN? 41 

A. The Regressive Method 

Here we must note the starting-point or premiss of the 
argument : it is the term which Nature, in the process of her 
long development, has reached — the final page, which now lies 
unfolded before us, of her vast and varied history. That end 
is not represented by the inter-relations of plants and animals 
under domestication, nor is it represented by the organisms 
that exhibit the highest forms of structural excellence. The 
point from which we have to start is Man, and man is Mind. 
And it is not individual man. He is a small being, even 
though he be a universe in miniature; he is a simple problem, 
even though he be the measure of all things. The man we 
mean is vaster and more complex — collective man, with his 
arts, his letters, his empires, his intellectual achievements, his 
ethical ideals, his laws and his religions. It is man with all 
the qualities that mark him as a race, which, though made up 
of an infinite multitude of units, is yet a great organic unity. 

(i.) If, now, we are to apply evolution as a theory descrip- 
tive of the strictly natural process or method of creation, we 
shall have to explain everything that has come to be through 
what was before it and what is around it. Let us begin, 
then, by going backwards from man one single step and 
coming to the animal. And here our question is as large 
as it is direct : — Is evolution, as a theory of the creational 
process moving within strictly natural lines and appealing 
to none but natural forces, able to account for man by the 
upward struggle of those beneath him ? Some years ago 
we had eager and even angry discussions as to man's place 
in Nature. It was argued that " man was separated by no 
greater structural barrier from the brutes than they are from 
one another " ; and it was further argued that " if any pro- 
cess of physical causation can be discovered by which the 
genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced 
that process of causation [and we note the term ' causation '] 



42 MAN AND APE IN NATURAL 

is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man." * And 
this process was said to have been discovered in the theory 
which will ever be honourably associated with the name of 
Darwin. A still more audacious thinker with a wider out- 
look than Huxley had, like him, argued from the structure of 
the man-like ape, from similarity in the greater organs, from 
the skull and cranial capacity, from hand and foot and teeth, 
from texture and size of the brain, that the ape might be 
called the older form of the man, and that there was no 
insuperable barrier between the man and the ape. 2 

Now let us understand precisely what an argument of this 
kind amounts to. There are, on the one hand, when man 
and the ape are regarded simply as organisms, similarities 
and differences of structure ; but, on the other hand, when 
the persons or beings organized are taken into account, there 
are between them specific differences of history and achieve- 
ment without any corresponding specific similarities. Now, 
the organic or structural affinities are obvious enough, and 
the consequences they involve may be drawn without any 
recourse to a too heroic logic. What is more flagrantly 
apparent, and more in need of adequate explanation, are the 
historical and personal differences. Is it argued that the 
structural similarities imply such a genetic relation that the 
man must be regarded as the descendant of the manlike ape? 
If so, is it also argued that the structural differences which 
make the man a new species, are the causes of his superior 
excellence ? If not so, it is obvious that the real point at 
issue is not simply a question of structure, but of personality 
and its history. For let us see the facts that have to be 
explained. Here is a man-like ape. He is, as far as history 
is concerned, an older being than man ; he can boast a more 
venerable ancestry ; he is a more ancient inhabitant of our 

1 Huxley, Marts Place in Nature, p. 146. 

2 Haeckel, Hist, of Creation, cc. xxii. xxiv. — Anthropogenie (Vierter 
Abschnitt) ; cf. Confession of Faith of a Man of Science, p. 38. 



AND IN CIVIL HISTORY 43 

planet, and has had, therefore, the greater opportunities a 
longer course of time have supplied, in which to develop the 
resources that are in him and achieve his man-like apehood. 
But how stands the case ? He stands to-day precisely where 
his most ancient ancestor stood ; he cracks his nuts and 
feeds himself in the ancestral manner ; he practises the old 
arboreal architecture ; he lives in the old home in the old 
way, swings himself from tree to tree by the same organ 
and with the same dexterity ; he emits sounds of alarm or 
ferocity or affection, cries of defiance or of solicitation, which 
men may try to imitate but can only understand by ceasing 
as much as possible to be men and becoming apes. In 
a word, he began as a brute and a brute he remains. 

But what of man? He may have begun by dwelling in caves 
and holes of the earth, but he has not continued to dwell 
there. He has built for himself the hut and the wigwam ; 
he has designed and erected the stately pleasure-house ; he 
has reared the palace and has embosomed it in beauty ; he 
has dreamed of temples for his gods and cathedrals for wor- 
ship, and he has realized these in stones which seem even 
more lordly than his dreams. His earliest essays in art may 
have been rude pictures on the walls of his cave, or on the 
bones of some animal he had slain and eaten, or on his 
own limbs or face, to make him beautiful to his friends or 
hideous to his foes. But he has not stayed at the stage 
where he first used tools ; on the contrary, he has disciplined 
and trained himself in art until there has arisen under his 
chisel the shape of a man so passing fair that it seemed to 
need only speech to be the man it seemed, or an image of 
his deity so sublime, so godlike and august, that men who 
have looked upon it have said, " Lo ! we have beheld God 
face to face " ; or he has trained himself so to mix his 
colours and so to handle his brush as to make flowers bloom 
and landscapes to unfold their beauty on canvas, until men 
have seen through his eyes and from the work of his hands 



44 MIND MAKES THE HISTORIES DIFFER 

more in Nature than they had ever discovered for themselves. 
Man's social life may have begun in a state of savage war, 
where the strong man reigned and the weak man went to 
the wall ; he may then have lived as the animal that devours 
its foes, even though of its own kind, and lives by plunder, 
by rapine, and by a killing that is no murder. But out of 
that savage state he slowly and painfully emerged into social 
and political order, built him up states governed by laws 
which judges impartially interpret and magistrates administer 
with justice — laws which protect the weak, punish the crimi- 
nal, secure freedom to those who love it and safety to those 
who have known how to multiply the wealth and increase 
the graces of life. He has created great empires that have 
lived through centuries, developed civilization, broadened 
culture, and made history. Then his speech may have begun 
in rude cries, mere interjections, now of alarm, now of en- 
joyment, now of discovery, even as brute may call unto 
brute, sounding the note of danger or the signal for prey 
found ; but he, by-and-by, learned to weave words into 
language — the most marvellous of all man's creations — and 
language into tales, to represent it by pictures, to create 
for it symbols and signs that made the transient word a 
thing imperishable. From his rude tales have come great 
literatures : the epic, with its heroes and its battles, its 
march of armies or its wandering sages, its pictures of 
grand shapes that have been or of terrible fates yet to 
be ; the lyric, with its cry of love, man yearning after woman, 
woman after man, and both after God ; the tragedy, with 
its tales of will in conflict with destiny, of character at 
war with circumstance. And this literature he has made 
thousandfold, mysterious, immortal, in many tongues and 
in many times. He may have started on his new career as 
a being with a capacity for religion, one who feared powers 
invisible impersonated in a blasted tree, a rude stone, a 
whitened bone, or a running stream, but he has not stood 



MAN IS MIND, THE BRUTE MINDLESS 45 

fixed in that rude faith ; he has made him religions to com- 
fort and to uplift his soul ; he has believed in gods who could 
do gracious or awful things ; he has come to think of a God 
majestic, sole, holy, ineffable, who inhabiteth eternity ; to 
think of man as one who looks before and after, and who 
follows his thought into the eternity towards which it has 
ever aspired. Man has been a wonderful creator, and his 
creations have only just begun. No day dawns that does 
not see some new wonder added to the wondrous history of 
the race ; the century which has just ended being for invention, 
for discovery, for its marvellous enlargement of knowledge 
and increased sovereignty over Nature, the most extraordinary 
of all the crowded and glorious centuries of his existence. 

In the face, then, of their contrasted histories, let us now put 
man and the man-like ape together and ask, What is the 
problem they offer to science ? Do the eloquently minimized 
differences which we find in the structure of the man as 
distinguished from the man-like ape, explain the differences 
in their histories? If they do, then we ought to be told how 
such small differences in structure have become causes of 
effects so wondrously and vastly opposite. If they do not, 
then why speak as if man and the man-like ape stood in the 
same system, and were in any tolerable sense related as 
ancestor and progeny ? When their respective histories are 
viewed together and honestly compared, is it true that man 
is in faculty as in structure one with the brutes ? Must 
it not rather be affirmed that man starts with some endow- 
ment which the brute has not? If Darwin needed his first 
form before he could trace the genesis of species, so no 
less is it true that we must have mind before the history 
of man becomes possible or capable of intellectual realiza- 
tion. But if it be mind that constitutes the differentiation of 
man from brute, then to imagine that the distance be- 
tween them is reduced by the discovery of similarities in 
their organic structure, is a mere irrelevance of thought. 



46 WHAT DARWIN ASKED 

But we have come by another way to the very conclusion 
which was reached by our previous argument : the reason or 
mind which distinguishes man from the brute, relates him to 
the heart or secret of the universe. The same intellect which 
separates him from the animal, binds him to the intelligible in 
Nature and to the Intelligence which is above both and ex- 
plains both. Where he is distinguished from the lower he 
attains kinship with the higher ; and so our premiss, changed 
in form but unchanged in essence, emerges as the reasoned 
conclusion of the discussion, viz., the noumenal and not the 
phenomenal explains man, and shows the substance of his 
being to be one with the essence of the universe which he 
perceives and construes. 

(ii.) But we have as yet taken only a single step in the re- 
gressive process, and so must further proceed with our back- 
ward search for the sufficient reason of the Nature we know. 
The stages would indeed be many and our progress both slow 
and toilsome were we to pause over each and there pursue 
our analytic quest — the birth of consciousness, the dawn of 
sentient life, the advent of the animal and the vegetable. But 
instead let us at once step across the successive periods and 
down the descending species of the organic kingdom until we 
enter the inorganic. Our question now is, whether it be pos- 
sible to find in the physical energies or forces which science 
supposes to have preceded life, the cause of life, with all its 
forms, its infinite possibilities and multitudinous activities ? 
Can we imagine anything within the terms of Nature a> 
Nature was before life or mind were, or as we must conceive 
it to have then been, which would be a Sufficient Reason 
for the history that was to be? Darwin, as we have just 
seen, asked to be allowed to assume a first or a few forms 
in order that he might show how the earth, as it pursued 
its silent way through space, was tenanted with living beings 
and became the arena of all their works. But simple as his 
request seemed, it was a tremendous assumption that he asked 



TO BE ALLOWED TO ASSUME 47 

leave to make, for it meant that he wanted to start from an 
unexplained Something, a mystery, a miracle — originated life, 
though how and why it had originated, what cause adequate 
to its production was lying behind, he did not know and 
did not presume to enquire. He asked, in short, no less a 
gift in the form of a premiss than the old theologian asked 
when he meekly took for granted the creation of Adam, in 
order that he might deduce from him mankind and all their 
works. For Darwin asked permission to posit not only the 
few forms whose being had just begun, but also the environ- 
ment within which they lived, i.e. the whole conception of 
created forms and a creative Nature already at work upon 
them. He thus, under this explicit petitio principii, smuggled 
in two of the largest conceptions which can be formed by the 
mind of man, the very conceptions which have perplexed the 
race into belief in all the cosmogonies. But it enabled him to 
do another and no less important thing, viz., conceal from 
himself the distinction between a simplified cause and a 
simplified process ; and this was the more to be regretted as 
the rigorous simplicity he intended to illustrate in his natural 
process of creation enormously increased the complexity of 
the cause he so quietly assumed. For let us attempt to ima- 
gine the vision that might have come to a prescient mind 
watching those parent forms in their first blind struggles for 
a hardly discernible life, while yet foreseeing all that was to 
be. The vision would start with the spectacle of a steaming 
earth waiting to become the fruitful mother of all living 
things, with the simplest germs of organic being bedded deep 
in her hot and hardening slime. As the earth cooled and the 
moisture folded the minute organisms in its damp but fer- 
tilizing embrace, new and higher forms were seen to multiply, 
vegetation became abundant, gigantic trees and vast forests 
stood rooted in the rich soil and raised their branches into 
the warm and liquid air ; while there moved through deep 
lagoons immense reptiles, which Nature, in her first endea- 



48 MIND NO PROCESSION FROM MATTER 

vours at protection, clothed in coats of mail, seeming to think 
that they would not die because their enemy could not reach 
the centre of their life. But climatic changes come. The 
huge creatures vanish, the mammal appears, and the process 
of evolution goes on till Nature teems with myriad forms 
of organic life. And then the supreme moment approaches, 
man steps upon the scene and forthwith begins to modify 
the nature which has been so creative, to subdue the animals 
that have been so mighty, to build himself cities, to form 
states, to speak with tongues, to develop arts, to create litera- 
tures, to formulate laws, to realize religions, — in a word, to 
create the society and the civilization that we know so well. 
Now what in the inorganic mass which it surveyed could 
the prescient mind discover capable of accomplishing these 
things ? Nothing ; unless he conceived the mass as, though 
inorganic, yet capable of creating organic being, of think- 
ing like himself so as to create thought. But how could he 
so conceive it without changing it from a mass of conserved 
and correlated forces into the seedplot or seminal garner of all 
that was to be ? But how could that womb which was thus 
pregnant with all the organs, all the organisms, all the minds 
of the future, be described as dead ? Was it not rather quick 
with all the germs of all the forms that were waiting the touch 
of time to live, laden with all the potencies and all the qualities 
and all the lives of the future ? If, then, we attempt to con- 
ceive what was before life and mind as the condition or cause 
or factor of their being, we must invest it with the qualities 
which enable it to do its work. And what is this but turning 
it from dead matter into living spirit? 

B. The Egressive Method 

(i.) But the question which has just been raised as to the 
relation of the primordial inorganic forces to the creation and 
development of organic forms, can be better discussed under 



MATTER NO MOTHER OF MIND 49 

the head of the egressive than of the regressive method. How 
shall we conceive, how define or describe, the stuff which was 
before life and was the father of all living things ? It would be 
hard to set man a severer or less soluble problem than this : 
to imagine or discover within Nature as known to him a 
physical substance, or any concourse or combination of physi- 
cal elements or qualities, that could, within a universe that 
knew no life, cause life to begin to be. The frankest terms 
are here the soberest and the truest : the thing is inconceiv- 
able. It is not simply that the primary generation would 
have to be spontaneous, i.e. self-caused, i.e. miraculous in the 
superlative degree, — for spontaneous generation is a thing 
unknown to experimental science, and to biological observa- 
tion, and is, at best, but a form under which the operation 
of an unknown cause is disguised ; but also because matter 
cannot be defined save in terms that imply mind. Whether 
mind may be conceived without matter, is a point that 
may be argued ; but matter can be represented in no form 
which does not imply mind. And this may be stated in the 
form of what may be described as a curious and instructive 
law in philosophy, whether ancient or modern. The highest 
speculations concerning the ultimate cause have been expressed 
in the terms of the intellect or the reason, while those which 
have ventured to use physical or material terms have had all 
the rarity of the exception which proves the rule. And this 
law is made the more impressive by the fact that the excep- 
tions apply mainly to the childhood of speculation, but the 
rule to its manhood or maturity. 

One of the most characteristic things in modern thought is 
the history of the ultimate causal idea in the school whose 
fundamental principles forbade them the use of transcen- 
dental terms. It would be traversing too familiar and well- 
beaten paths to trace the genesis and examine the basis 
of Hume's scepticism ; but this may be said : within the circle 
which accepted his first principles and followed his method 

P.C.R. 4 



50 EMPIRICISM BECOMES A PSYCHOLOGY 

there happened what can only be described as a paralysis of 
the speculative faculty, and the reduction of philosophy to 
the limits and the problems of a more or less conjectural 
psychology. Its members assumed, not willingly but from 
sheer logical compulsion, an attitude of ignorance or impotence 
towards the problems, which had, by simply though imperi- 
ously demanding solution of the reason, been perhaps the 
most potent educative agencies in the history of our race ; and 
confined themselves to the question as to how our ideas came 
to be associated, and so to bear to man the appearance of a 
reasonable order. Thus we have the elder Mill attempting an 
"Analysis of the Human Mind," in its essence a confession that 
a psychology was the only possible philosophy ; and that con- 
cerning the relations of thought and being, or of the cause and 
end of being, " nothing whatever could be known." Comte, too, 
had, if not a speculative soul, the hunger of the true system- 
builder, satiable only by an order that could be formulated, 
ambitious to classify and organize knowledge, to demonstrate 
the laws of human progress, and to create the only real and 
possible conditions of human happiness. But he understood 
the empirical philosophy he inherited from Hume, and knew 
well the iron lines it had drawn, the blank impenetrable walls it 
had built round the spirit, and he loved logic too dearly to seek 
to escape into a freer air. So he declared phenomena to be 
all that man could know, proclaimed the search after a First 
Cause vain, placed the very word " cause " under a rigorous 
ban, dismissed psychology from the circle of the sciences, and 
planted physiology in its stead. And his early English inter- 
preters were here specially emphatic. One brilliant scholar, 
G. H. Lewes, wrote a History of Philosophy, expressly to prove 
that metaphysics was the search after the illusive, that their 
reign had ceased, that the birth of Positivism was the dawn of 
a millennium when barren problems should cease to trouble and 
only fruitful facts and phenomena occupy mind. The subtle 
and assimilative intellect of John Stuart Mill felt the same 



AND CEASES TO BE CONSTRUCTIVE 51 

paralyzing influence. He loved to be constructive, and was 
so, though in a less degree than he desired, in politics, 
in economics, and in formal logic ; but when he came to 
metaphysics, he was content with mere analytic criticism 
and inconclusive psychology. And even before he could 
get to it he had to postulate three great things : the mind, 
the tendency of the mind to expectancy, and the laws of 
association ; and then on this vast assumed and unreasoned 
basis he attempted to explain the relation of mind to the 
outer world. Yet he did not, like Kant, frankly recognize 
that these assumptions of his were transcendental principles, 
a priori forms of perception, categories of thought or factors 
of knowledge which he had no right to use. But he hid 
meekly — as it were under a proposition he need not argue — - 
the most fundamental of all possible questions : What was 
mind ? Why had mind expectancy ? How was it that in 
mind the laws of association worked? And higher and more 
transcendental still was the question, Whence did the idea 
come, and how was it that it came to mind, and was by thought 
turned into something absolutely different from the Nature 
that sent it? And when he proceeded to define matter as "the 
permanent possibility of sensation," what did he define it as 
being? Something subjective, dependent on mind. If matter 
be " a permanent possibility of sensation," how, without the 
sentient consciousness, could we have matter ? And when, 
later, he resolved mind into " a permanent possibility of feel- 
ing," he carefully forgot that he had assumed mind, its ex- 
pectancy and associative laws, in order that he might explain 
matter as "the permanent possibility of sensation." In a word, 
Mill's analysis was too purely governed by the old empiricism 
to allow him to reach either subjective or objective reality. 
He would have been more consistent had he, with Berkeley, 
confessed spirit to be the one solid and enduring entity, 
and matter a mere idea. This was what he meant, but 
what he could not say without being forced to the theistic 



52 CAN MATTER BE DEFINED? 

conclusion of his great predecessor. And so instead we had 
both the subject and the object of knowledge reduced to the 
permanent possibilities of things unknown. 

But science was suddenly seized with a speculative pas- 
sion, begotten of two great doctrines — the Conservation of 
Energy and Evolution. Sleight of tongue is a more illusive 
art than even sleight of hand, and metaphysics do not be- 
come physics by being stated in the terms of " matter, 
motion, and force," nor do they turn into biology by being 
expressed in the formulae of natural selection. So impelled 
by the speculative passion which made physical terms the 
vehicle of metaphysical ideas, thinkers like Mr. Lewes 
forgot their paralyzed nescience, and began to lay the 
" foundations of a creed." Men of science became adven- 
turous world-builders ; awed us by natural histories of crea- 
tion, overawed us by visions of our long descent, and the 
easy elegance with which they could leap the boundary 
which divided the organic from the inorganic kingdom, and 
find in matter " the promise and the potency of every form 
and quality of life." Their difficulties and our perplexities 
began when they tried to define matter, or to find it with- 
out assuming the mind it was to explain, or to leave it in any 
sense the matter known to science and yet deduce from it a 
living and organic Nature. Goethe's words were gratefully 
recalled : " Matter can never exist and be operative without 
spirit, nor spirit without matter." So were Schleicher's : 
" There is neither matter nor spirit in the customary sense, 
but only one thing which is at the same time both." Then 
we had the despairing but descriptive phrase of the late 
Professor Clifford, " mind-stuff," and Professor Bain's, " One 
substance with two sets of properties ; two sides, the physical 
and the mental ; a double-faced unity." But what is this 
save carrying back into the beginning the dualism of the 
living consciousness? It did not define or describe the 
primordial stuff which constituted and created the world, 



GRANT IT CAN, WHAT THEN? 53 

but only expressed a distinction which came into being with 
the conscious Self. " Two sets of properties " imply a mind 
through whom they are perceived ; " a double-faced unity " 
implies eyes to which the faces appear ; and these are but 
attempts to get the effects of mind out of the primordial 
matter without conceiving the matter as mind. 

(ii.) But suppose we abandon all logical reservations and 
make a present of the conception of matter to the venture- 
some thinker who would deduce from it the Nature we 
know, are his difficulties ended ? Nay, they are only about 
to begin. He is at once faced by the questions : When 
and why did the creative process commence? What moved 
the atoms toward their miraculous work? What had they 
been about before? Why did they begin then? Why not 
earlier ? Why not later ? Matter on this hypothesis has 
always been ; it is eternal, it is indestructible, and in its 
existence that of its properties is involved. Now however 
far back the primary movement is carried, eternity lies 
beyond it. Why in that eternity did not the eternal matter 
work itself into a world ? Why at this specific moment was 
it started on its creative career ? We may, with Democritus, 
imagine atoms, quantitatively but not qualitatively different, 
falling through the void, the heavier by colliding against the 
lighter causing a lateral movement that results in their aggre- 
gation and combination, and in the generation of the heat 
without which we can have no life. But to conceive atoms 
tumbling for ever through infinite space, meeting, and by 
impact causing heat and changing direction or form, yet ever 
acting according to their mechanical properties, is not to come 
one whit nearer the understanding of how this inorganic mass 
became the parent of all organic being. It is significant that 
neither modern physics, perhaps the most audacious in specu- 
lation of all the sciences, nor chemistry, possibly the most 
skilled in the secrets of Nature, has advanced us here a single 
step beyond Democritus : instead of his dvayKr/, men may use 



54 INTELLIGENCE AND EVOLUTION 

the terms " chance " or " unknown," but they all mean the 
same thing : to matter, as science must conceive it, causation 
of life, not to speak of mind, is a sheer impossibility. 

But now suppose the transition is made from a world of 
inorganic force to a world of living forms, how are we to 
explain their increase and development ? For one thing, it 
is impossible to imagine that the power which produced the 
first form exhausted itself in the effort and thenceforward 
ceased to act. The growth, the multiplication, and the 
differentiation of organisms are but the forms under which the 
original creative energy continues to operate. The inex- 
plicable element in the origination survives through all the 
later processes, though hidden away in the ample folds of 
the immense mantle which our ignorance names the environ- 
ment. And here one instructive fact deserves to be noted : 
in order that the struggle for life may be attended with 
survival, attributes and acts of intelligence are ascribed to 
unintelligent creatures, processes, or things. Thus Mr. Alfred 
Wallace praises Darwin because of the brilliant generalization 
he gives in his work on Orchids, viz., " that flowers have 
become beautiful solely to attract insects to assist in their 
fertilization." But this generalization implies the capacity in 
the flower to feel, if not to observe, what pleases the insect ; 
the ability to appeal to this pleasure, the desire to use it for 
personal ends, and the instinct or intuition that can turn 
personal into altruistic acts. If it were not for the meta- 
phors he borrows from mind, the biologist would never be 
able to make his processes seem natural. And this means 
that Nature is to him alive with intelligence ; that it is able 
to accomplish its end — the increase of life and development 
of living forms — only because it appears, when all its parts 
are taken together, a sort of incorporated Mind. 

But though organic life has been produced, Nature is not 
yet : before she can be a further step must be taken forward 
into Mind. But this last, the most inexorable step of all, is 



THE METAPHYSIC OF KNOWING AND OF BEING 55 

the most completely beyond our rational capacity. For there 
is nothing that physiology has been so little able to do as to 
discover the relation between organization and consciousness. 
As Tyndall once said, a man can as little prove any causal 
relation between these two as he can lift himself by his own 
waistband. The phenomena may be parallel, but they do 
not stand respectively in the relations of cause and effect. 
We are left, then, with a natural process that leaves, as 
regards explanation, the main thing precisely where it was 
found. Mind, in its action and its origin, is a great enigma. 
How it emerges is as insoluble a mystery as what it has 
achieved. But one thing seems evident, that it can be got 
out of Nature only by being deposited in Nature ; that what 
constitutes Nature has constructed Nature, that what makes 
her capable of interpretation is one with the condition that 
makes the process of knowledge real and actual. 

§ IV. Conclusions and Inferences 

The issue of this discussion, then, seems to be that we 
cannot conceive either Nature or its creative work otherwise 
than through Mind. The metaphysic of knowledge is one 
with the metaphysic of being. We may therefore express 
our conclusion thus : The transcendental cannot be excluded 
from our view of the universe, but the transcendental in 
philosophy is the correlate of the supernatural in theology, 
The former uses abstract speech, the latter employs concrete 
terms ; but it is only when the abstract becomes concrete that 
it receives application and reality. To affirm the transcen- 
dence of thought is to affirm the priority of spirit, for spirit 
is but thought made concrete — translated, as it were, into 
a personal and creative energy ; it is mind as opposed to 
matter, a known as distinguished from an unknown, con- 
ceived as the cause of all dependent being. And how can 
we better express this thought in its highest concrete form 
than by the ancient name God ? 



56 NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 

But now what is the bearing of this discussion and con- 
clusion on the question with which we started, Whether the 
idea of a supernatural Person be compatible with the modern 
conception of Nature ? 

I. Let us attempt to state what seem the fair and logical 
deductions from our argument. 

A. Nature takes a larger and richer sense than is known 
to the physical sciences ; it includes thought, the whole mys- 
terious kingdom of the spirit through which it is and for 
which it is. From this point of view the distinction be- 
tween the natural and the supernatural^ ceases, or becomes 
thoroughly unreal. For the supernatural, as commonly 
taken, denotes a cause or will outside as well as above Nature, 
opposed to it and supersessive of its laws ; but here it denotes 
a cause which is as native to Nature as reason or thought 
is to man. Withdraw or paralyze this cause, and Nature as 
its effect ceases, i.e. without the supernatural the natural can 
neither begin nor continue to be. But how can we conceive 
Nature without the idea which is necessary to its very being 
as a complete and self-contained whole? And as it is only 
when our view takes in the whole that Nature is ration- 
ally conceived, we can never regard that as a scientific 
interpretation of Nature which applies mathematical processes 
or laws to the behaviour of bodies in space, but forgets the 
mind that compels man to think the pure ideas of his 
reason ; which speaks of energy or force but ignores the will 
through which man knows it is ; and which imagines it suffi- 
cient to exhibit the genesis of a form without feeling it 
needful to find a sufficient reason for that process of con- 
tinuous creation which we call the history of man. Nature, 
then, is not rationally conceived when the supernatural is 
excluded, but only when it is viewed as standing in and 
through the supernatural, i.e. when Nature is conceived as 
constituted not by forces that can be measured or by energies 
that struggle for life, but by the thought which makes it and 



SPIRIT IS GOD'S REAL CREATION 57 

which finds it intelligible, that is, organizes and articulates it 
into a coherent and rational Idea. 

B. As the only concrete term which can adequately de- 
scribe the creative Mind or Intelligence is God, and as the 
created intellect is man, two things follow : (a) the intrinsic 
character of the creation to which God is related, and (/3) 
the quality and nature of His relation. 

(a) The real creation of God is Spirit ; and if we attempt 
to conceive His creative action simply under physical cate- 
gories, or to state it in the terms of physics, we shall never 
either truly conceive or rightly describe it. In the strictest 
sense matter has no independent being, but spirit has, for 
independence is made by two things — the ability to know 
and the capacity of being known. Neither attribute belongs 
to matter per se. It is a mere abstract till mind has, by 
investing it with qualities, made it concrete ; and thus were 
mind withdrawn, there would be no matter. But while 
mind may be necessary to the concrete being of matter, 
for matter mind has no being ; neither can share the other's 
life ; for where knowledge does not meet knowledge there 
can be no fellowship, no reciprocity or correlativity of being. 
And where there is no knowledge the highest, if not the sole, 
reality is absent ; for what does not know does not really 
exist; it may have being for another but has none for itself. 
It follows that God and man both are, since both are capable 
of knowing and of being known, i.e. each is real both to 
himself and to the other ; but neither is real to the matter 
which owes all its actuality to mind. Hence the real pre- 
sence of God must be stated not in physical but in spiritual 
terms ; it belongs to the sphere of rational experience, and 
not to the field of mechanical energies. The latter may be 
an arena within which the Divine will may operate ; but the 
former, as accessible to spirit, can receive and feel and realize 
the Divine presence ; in other words, matter may be through 
God's will and to His reason, but mind is open to Himself. 



58 THE INEXHAUSTIBLE CREATOR 

He can fill, possess, and live within it just because He can 
be for it ; and this intercommunal life is the beatitude of 
God in the creature and of the creature in God. 

(yS) What then constitutes the universe a reality to God 
are the spirits He has created to inhabit it, exactly as a house 
is a house to a man by virtue not of its rooms and its furni- 
ture, but of the persons who there live in and through and 
for him, though the more he cares for the persons the less 
will he be indifferent to the furniture and the rooms. But 
if this be so, we may fairly infer that God will not become 
a mere curious spectator of their ways and works, as a 
man may be of the architecture and industry displayed 
by a hive of bees ; but that He will remain in positive and 
active relations with them, all the more present that He 
may be totally unperceived. For only thus can He complete 
His creation, since, according to its very nature, Spirit can- 
not be made all at once, but only by such a continuous 
process of discipline and instruction as will bring it under 
the law and fill it with the illumination of God. 

C. God, then, as the Perfect Reason and Almighty Will 
through whose action and by whose energy Nature was and 
is, cannot be conceived as otiose or inactive ; omnipresence 
is not an occasional, but a permanent attribute of Deity, 
omnipotence is not incidental or optional. He must be 
everywhere, and wherever He is He must be operative. 
Omniscience simply means the omnipresent intellect in 
exercise. God is the thought that is diffused through all 
space and active in all time. And this involves the conse- 
quence that the form under which His relation to Nature 
ought to be conceived is immanence, though not as exclud- 
ing transcendence ; for the very reason that requires the in- 
terpretative intellect to be transcendent, requires also the 
causal Intelligence to be the same. But it is the active inter- 
course of these two that constitutes Nature as an intelligible 
whole. For the Divine immanence in Nature is inseparable 



AND THE CONTINUED CREATION 59 

from the same immanence in mind. There is, so to speak, a 
constant process of intercommunication, God with man and 
man with God. And this means that His beneficence be- 
comes a universal and continuous activity. We could not 
imagine a Being with any grace of character creating for any 
motives save such as could be described as good, still less 
could we conceive Him proving unstable and in the course of 
His providence changing to another and lower will than He 
had in the beginning. If He were moved to create, it could 
only be that He might through creation find a richer beati- 
tude ; and if the creature was needful to His blessedness, He 
must be still more needful to its. But if this be so, it can 
only mean that His creative action never ceases : the sabbath 
of the Creator is found in an activity which is ever beneficent 
and never tires. 

D. Creation, then, is here conceived not as a finished but 
as a continuous process. The will of God is the energy of 
the universe : uniform and permanent in quantity, yet express- 
ing itself in modes of an infinite variety. Nature without the 
supernatural Will were a vaster miracle, or rather an infinite 
series of vaster miracles, than Nature realized through it ; but 
a concluded creation would be more miraculous still, for it 
could only signify an exhausted universe and a dead Deity. 
What do the theories of energy and evolution mean but the 
continuance of the creative process ? But if new forms in 
biology have emerged, — if from however mean an origin, in a 
mode however low, Mind once began to be, why may not new 
and higher types appear in the modes and forms of being 
known to history as politics, ethics, religion ? In other words, 
may not the very Power which determined the appearance of 
the first form, and the whole course of evolution from it, 
determine also the appearance of creative Persons in history 
and of all the events which may follow from their appearance? 
Might we not describe the failure of the fit or the needed man 
to appear at some supreme moment as a failure which affects 



60 THE HIGHEST THING IN NATURE 

the whole creation ? And would not the work he did for God 
be the measure of the degree of the Divine Presence or 
quantity of the Divine energy immanent within him ? 

2. It seems, then, fair to conclude that so far from the 
idea of a supernatural Person being incompatible with the 
modern idea of Nature, it is logically involved in it. That 
idea lives and moves and has its being in the mysterious 
or, let us frankly say, the miraculous. We begin in mystery ; 
we live in mystery ; and in mystery we end ; and what are we 
but symbols or parables of the vaster life of the whole ? But 
yet the key of all mysteries is man. The first and last, the 
highest and the surest thing in Nature, is the thought which 
explains Nature, but which Nature cannot explain. And the 
thought which Nature embodies has been progressive, has 
moved upwards to Mind, and a mind that feels its kinship 
with the Source, the Secret, and the End of all this mysterious 
system. Would it not be absolutely consistent with the 
whole past history of the creative action as written in the 
living forms which have dwelt and struggled on our earth, 
that the Creator should do for the higher life of man what He 
has done for the lower — create the first form, — i.e. first not in 
the chronological but in the logical and essential, or typical 
and normative, sense — the form after and from and through 
which the higher life may be realized ? Whether He has done 
so is a question which must be investigated and determined 
like any other reputed matter of fact. It is enough if our 
argument here has prevented it being decided by a high and 
rigorous method of a priori logic or presupposition. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE PROBLEM AS AFFECTED BY THE PHILOSOPHY OF 

ETHICS 

§ I. The Problems Raised by Man as an Ethical Being 

THE argument which has so far been pursued has 
proceeded on the principle that man is the inter- 
pretation as well as the interpreter of Nature. What is most 
characteristic of him is thought, and thought is exactly the 
reality which no physical theory of creation can explain. He 
is not only an object of knowledge, but he is the person who 
knows ; and there is no science which does not implicitly 
posit him as intelligence and Nature as intelligible. But man 
is more than a being whom the metaphysics of knowledge 
may attempt to explain ; for he is not summed up in the 
category of intellect. He is a doer ; he can and does act ; 
and his actions have specific qualities which are judged 
approvingly or disapprovingly alike by himself and the 
society within which he lives. The judgment, whether by 
the spectator or by the doer, as to the specific quality of an 
action is largely affected by its being regarded as the man's 
own. He believes himself, and is believed by others to be 
able to act or not to act. If compulsion determines con- 
duct, then judgment does not so much concern itself with 
him as with the power that compels him. Approval or dis- 
approval of conduct is thus conditioned by the belief in 
freedom of choice, in the ability to will freely. But this 
capability to do or refuse to do, with the judgment it con- 



62 LAW WHETHER PUBLIC OR PRIVATE 

ditions, further implies that there is a standard which ought 
to govern the man's conduct but which may not be allowed 
to do it. In other words, there is a law which he ought to 
obey, though he may not do as he ought. 

Nor is this all. The man is not simply an isolated unit ; 
he is an integral part of a social unity. He is a member 
of a family, which is a sort of organism whose varied organs 
stand in relation to each other as well as to a wider whole ; 
and the family is liable to be judged in the same way 
as the man, its character and collective conduct falling into 
similar categories of good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous 
and vicious. The family in its turn stands within the larger 
society of a city or a tribe ; and the city or tribe stands in 
the still wider society of the State. And law, written or 
unwritten, again appears as regulating the relations and 
actions of these persons and communities, — the conduct of 
the units in the family, and of the family as a whole, to 
the city, to the tribe, or to the State, and also the 
acts and relations of the city, tribe, or State to both in- 
dividuals and family. The State regards certain actions as 
noxious, certain others as innocuous. It protects both itself 
against the noxious and the individual in the performance 
of the innocuous act ; and if it has to judge of certain 
overt actions done by one citizen or family to another citizen 
or family, it bases its judgments upon some positive law or 
principle of equity as between man and man or citizen and 
citizen. The standard by which the individual judges may 
be termed " moral " ; the standard by which the State judges, 
may be termed " civil " or " criminal " or " natural " law ; but 
in every case the standard of judgment is rooted in moral 
ideas which affect or condition the sentence pronounced. We 
thus find that judgment on the acts of men and communities 
implies the qualitative character of their actions : they are 
praised or blamed according as their qualities are judged 
to be good or bad. 



JUDGES QUALITY OF ACTIONS 63 

Then men, tribes, cities, societies, and States exist in almost 
every possible condition of culture, from the most savage to 
the most highly civilized ; but amid all the differences which 
distinguish these varied conditions there is a single unifying 
idea — a certain similarity in the essence, if not in the form, of 
their moral judgments. It is easy indeed to indicate degrees 
in the laxity or elasticity of moral standards, to notice how at 
•certain stages of progress or among certain peoples lying may 
be regarded as almost a virtue, stealing as a necessary if not 
-a natural thing. But this has to be noted — that the lying 
which is held to be better than truth is the lie that is not 
found out ; the theft that is applauded is that which is so 
•cunningly conducted as not to be discovered. In other 
words, the favourable judgment depends on the thing being 
taken for its opposite ; if found out, it is judged according to 
its true quality. Public law nowhere endorses the lie or 
condones the theft; when it speaks, the judgment it ex- 
presses is moral. In order to be approved law must be just 
when it judges, though it cannot always command the evi- 
dence that enables it to be what all men feel it ought to be. 

We may say, then, that in universal law, universal custom, 
and universal language we have witnesses to the fact that 
when man, whether he be an individual or a community, 
judges actions, whether those of a person or a State, he does 
so according to a standard which must be characterized as 
moral. 

§ II. Empiricism in Knowledge and in Ethics 

This brings us to our primary and fundamental problem. 
How are we to explain the origin of these moral judgments ? 
What is their basis ? Where is the reason for the unity 
in moral idea which pervades all communities in the several 
stages of their social being? 

1. There is an intimate connection between the metaphysics 
of knowledge and the metaphysics of ethics ; they represent 



64 SOURCES OF MORAL IDEAS 

different sides of the same thing. If we need the a priori 
elements of the understanding in order that knowledge may 
be conceived as possible, we need no less in human nature 
transcendental moral elements in order that the genesis of our 
moral actions and the reason of our moral judgments may be 
understood. And so if a metaphysic supposes the mind to be 
a sheet of white paper on which Nature writes her marvellous 
story, then it must also suppose that all our moral ideas and 
judgments are creatures of experience, due to what man suffers 
rather than to what he has the faculty to achieve. There 
is, indeed, a difference between the process of knowledge and 
the evolution of morals. The process of knowledge is con- 
ceived as due to the action of Nature through sense upon 
what must still be spoken of as mind. But moral ideas must 
be represented as acquired not so much directly from Nature 
as indirectly through society, or from the action of man 
upon man, i.e. the interaction of the individual who struggles 
for life and the society that either struggles against him as 
a noxious force, or struggles to use him as an atom in its 
organism that may increase the energy needed for its own 
larger and more eventful movement. If the individual be 
thought to acquire his moral ideas through the experiences 
he undergoes in his social medium, they will be conceived as 
ideas that contribute to his fuller being, to the maintenance 
and development of his energies, to the use he can get out of 
life, or, in a word, to his pleasure or his happiness. If, on the 
other hand, the factor of his moral ideas be construed as the 
society in which he lives, then its function will be to implant 
itself within him, to get him to judge as it judges, to become, 
in a word, an epitome of its mind, a minister to its wealth, 
an agent of its well-being. According as the one standpoint 
or the other be adopted, the regulative standard of judgment 
will differ. In the one case it will be self-interest, in the 
other case it will be the communal interest — the greatest 
happiness of the greatest number. 



PLEASURE AS STANDARD OF VALUE 65 

2. Various attempts have been made to combine these 
points of view with greater or less success. In Hobbes we 
find the theory in a courageously individualistic form. Pleasure 
is the standard of right ; the action that most conduces to 
present happiness is best. Men call the actions that please 
virtues ; the actions that displease vices. Action depends on 
the will ; the will depends on the opinion of the good or evil 
which the act or its omission is to bring : therefore all action 
has its cause in the appetite for pleasure. The highest form of 
pleasure is glory, or to have a good opinion of one's self, of, 
more decently expressed, it is to love and to have power. 
Charity is but a form of this, for it consists in a man "finding 
himself able not only to accomplish his own desires, but 
also to assist other men in theirs." Yet so far is Hobbes 
from thinking that we are bound to contribute to another's 
happiness that he regards our own conscious pre-eminence 
as the condition of the highest enjoyment. Hence he de- 
scribes wit or laughter as enjoying " the sudden imagination 
of our own odds and eminency," or, what is its correlative, 
"another man's infirmity or absurdity." It " proceedeth 
from a sudden conception of some ability in himself that 
weigheth," or " in the elegant discovering and conveying to 
our minds some absurdity of another." The pleasures of 
memory consist in remembering some happy thing that 
occurred to oneself, or some miserable fate that befel a 
neighbour or a rival. This is a sort of colossal egoism, born 
of the idea that the strongest man is the best, that might 
is right, and that he who can impose his will on others 
and make them serve his ends, simply because they are his 
is the lawgiver and king. 

Hume, with more subtle skill, and a greater sense of what 
was needed to make a doctrine agreeable to the average man, 
endeavoured to reconcile the two points of view, the indi- 
vidual and the social, by saying that while the act that 
promotes pleasure is right, it is pleasure seen, as it were, from 

P.C.R. 5 



66 PAIN AND PLEASURE AS MASTERS 

the standpoint of society. " Whatever produces satisfaction 
is denominated virtue," " everything which gives uneasiness 
in human actions is called vice." If "the injustice is so dis- 
tant from us as no way to affect our interest, it still dis- 
pleases because we consider it as prejudicial to human 
society." Hence duty is the action promotive of happiness 
as it appears not to the narrow self, but to his larger environ- 
ment ; or, in a word, personal conduct viewed as society views 
it. Interest and sympathy are thus the sole sources of our 
moral obligations. When an action, seen as society sees it, 
tends to promote happiness, it gives pleasure, and is right. If, 
seen as society sees it, it tends to promote unhappiness, it gives 
pain, and so is wrong. The sense of duty is, therefore, the social 
feeling implanted in the breast of the individual. Conscience 
is the judgment of society expressed as self-judgment. 

Jeremy Bentham put the matter in a franker way. "Nature 
has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign 
masters, Pain and Pleasure." They tell us " what we ought 
to do, as well as determine what we shall do." To their 
throne the standard of right and wrong on the one hand, 
and the chain of causes and effects on the other, are bound. 
" The community is a fictitious body"; its interest is but "the 
sum of the interests of the several members who compose 
it." And interest means the thing or action which in the 
case of the individual " tends to add to the sum total of his 
pleasures, or to diminish the sum total of his pains." Here, 
then, is the final as well as the efficient cause of man's 
actions, and the standard by which they are to be judged. 
Those actions that make for pleasure are right ; those actions 
that make for pain are wrong. To men, therefore, as moral 
beings there exist only two things — agents and instruments 
of pleasure. The man himself is the agent, other men are 
the instruments ; and their value to him is their power to 
contribute toward this end, though the end is taken not as 
personal simply, but as the greatest happiness of the greatest 



"OUGHT" IN THE ETHICS OF UTILITY 67 

number. This being his standard of right, Bentham was, 
quite consistently, anxious to get rid of the too absolute 
sense of duty which had come into English ethics under the 
name of Conscience; and so he held that the evil thing in 
morals, the mark of the pedant, " the talisman of arrogancy, 
indolence, and ignorance," was the word "ought," "an authori- 
tative impostor," which might be tolerated in the other sciences, 
but ought to be expelled from the science of ethics. Yet even 
he was compelled to concede something to this imperious 
moral sense. We may say of an action " conformable to the 
principle of utility" that it "ought" to be done : in such a case 
the word has a meaning ; otherwise it has none. Bentham's 
disciple, James Mill, argued that the agreeable and pleasant 
were the same thing, and that all actions done for the agree- 
able, approximately or remotely, were right. But his illus- 
trious son introduced a famous distinction, the full significance 
of which we shall see by-and-by, between the qualities of 
pleasures ; and he proposed by this qualitative distinction to 
enable man to determine which actions were the more and 
which were the less excellent and obligatory. 

3. Now these systems suggest two remarks, First, while 
they proceeded on the principle that man is a natural being 
governed by natural impulses — especially the impulse to seek 
happiness, in order to a larger and richer life — yet as systems 
•of ethics they were attempts to moralize nature, i.e. they con- 
ceived man as if he were other and more than a mere natural 
being. For they were not simply theories explanatory of 
conduct, but they were even more schemes regulative of life, 
ideals of a better and more happily ordered being than Nature 
knew. They were not merely hypotheses of a science which 
tried to co-ordinate phenomena, but they were intended as 
guides to life, explaining principles and ends of action in 
order that they might be more easily and completely realized 
of men. Thus they did not deal with hunger in the man as if 
it had been the same in quality and character as hunger in 



68 THE PERSON AND SOCIETY 

the tiger. The instinct to satisfy appetite exists in both, but 
no code of ethics would have any significance for the tiger, 
and no body of men would judge concerning his attempts to 
satisfy his instincts and to escape famine as they would 
judge concerning the acts of a man. The very attempt, 
therefore, to interpret man ethically implied that he was more 
than a natural being, that he transcended nature, that his 
transcendence ought to be progressive in its quality, and that 
a completely moral state was one where laws proper to man 
governed men : creatures merely natural could not be gov- 
erned by such laws. 

But, secondly, these earlier ethical thinkers had to remain 
individualists even when laying most emphasis on the social 
sanction. The experience they thought of was personal ; 
each man had to acquire his own. The result was that the 
only form in which society could operate on him was by its 
positive forces and institutions, its methods of education, its 
systems of law and penalty ; and the only way in which he 
could realize the influence of society was by imaginatively 
occupying its standpoint and judging himself according to 
its standards. This involved so limited an experience, and 
so arbitrary a method of acquiring and exercising moral 
judgments, that the system inevitably broke down in the 
very hands of its builders ; for it could not but fail to estab- 
lish any real continuity or organic relation between past ex- 
perience and the living man, or between the organized society 
and the unit that it had to deal with, and that lived within 
its bosom. 

§ III. Ethics and Evolution 

I. But even more in ethics than in metaphysics the new 
scientific speculation has made itself felt. The theory of 
evolution in particular has radically affected our question. 
For it has supplied two important factors of our rational and 
moral experience — the idea of transmission and inheritance, 



BEFORE AND ATFER EVOLUTION 69 

and the idea of unlimited time. Before two incommensur- 
ables had faced each other : (a) the ephemeral individual 
without any experience behind him, who had to acquire 
moral ideas, exercise moral judgments, and realize moral 
character within the limits of a brief existence ; and (/3) the 
permanent society, which had in its continued being energies 
and an experience that left its units helpless in its hands. 
All that was needed was for the society so to impress itself 
by means of its sanctions on the transient individual, that he 
should, even for the brief season of his present existence, be- 
come a vehicle of its spirit, or a means to its end. But the 
doctrine of evolution, at any rate in its older and, possibly, 
still more orthodox form, made experience a thing more 
or less transmissible, and turned acquired characters into 
a species of heritable property. And so the individual, 
though transient, became through his inheritance in a sense 
as permanent as the society around him. He had within 
him tendencies, tempers, passions, traits that descended to 
him from innumerable ancestors, running back into imme- 
morial time, and made him, as it were, the sum of all their 
experience, the embodiment of what they had by action 
and experiment learned to become. And as the time 
during which the process went on was without limit, the 
result corresponded to what was beyond and before personal 
existence, rather than to what was around and within himself. 
The experience that he thus inherited from his vast ancestry 
became in him a sort of intuition, the correlative in man 
to instinct in the brute ; and his acts, while those of an 
ephemeral individual, yet proceeded from one who was the 
resultant of all his ancestors, and the vehicle for the trans- 
mission of their qualities to all his descendants. 

There are two forms in which this relation of evolution to- 
ethics has been presented : one where it represents the view 
of a modest naturalist, the other in which it represents the 
dream of a more venturesome metaphysician. 



70 DARWIN'S EVOLUTION OF ETHICS 

(a) Darwin saw that his theory must be applied to man as 
well as to animals, and assumed a law of continuity that re- 
quired our whole nature, social, moral, and intellectual, to be 
derived by a process of variation and development from the 
rudimentary forms discoverable in the lower animals. Their 
instincts were compared with the faculties of man, especially 
as he exists in the savage state ; and it was argued that the 
social instinct which made the approbation of the tribe act as 
a law to its members, was the mother of the moral faculty 
or sense. But the social instinct could more easily explain 
uniformity than difference, while it was upon difference more 
than uniformity that growth depended. Hence these variations 
in development had to be conceived as due not simply to the 
two factors of organism and environment, evolved and guided 
by natural selection and the struggle for existence, but also, 
in the last analysis, more or less to what may be termed 
accidents. There was no point more happily or extensively 
illustrated by Mr. Darwin than the arbitrary character of the 
fancy or the taste which in the lower races guided selection, 
whether sexual or natural ; and where the selection is arbi- 
trary it is under the rule of chance or circumstances. Yet he 
recognized no greater or more potent factor of the social 
framework, and therefore of the moral sense. We may say, 
then, that he so applied the principle of accidental or occa- 
sional variations to the growth of moral ideas or feelings as to 
leave them incidents that happened in the course of things 
rather than products of any reason, personal or collective. 
The accidents indeed to which they were due were condi- 
tioned by the operation of Nature ; but still they were things 
that observation could not explain otherwise than by saying 
they might or might not have occurred. 

(/3) But a philosophical theory of evolution cannot allow a 
place within it to the accidental, and so Mr. Herbert Spencer 
has attempted to eliminate the notion of accident by enun- 
ciating the principle — rwhich, by the way, was cogently stated 



SPENCER'S "IDEAL CONGRUITY " 7 J 

in almost identical terms by Hobbes — that the " conduct 
which conduces to life in each and all " is good ; that " plea- 
sure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is as 
much a necessary form of moral intuition as space is a neces- 
sary form of intellectual intuition " ; that it is so because 
pleasure makes for the conservation of life, and the tendency 
of every organized being is to conserve its life ; and that the 
struggle to conserve life during the long periods of evolution 
has resulted in the discovery of those acts which, by beget- 
ting pleasures, most tend to its conservation. In this theory, 
then, two things have to be noted : (a) the objective end 
which governs the process ; and (/3) the subjective faculties 
and judgments which the process creates. The end is con- 
tained in Mr. Spencer's notion of the life for which all beings 
struggle, and towards whose fuller realization the conduct 
qualified as good conduces. Life consists in " the continuous 
adjustment of internal relations to external relations," or, in 
the terms of the more familiar formula, the adaptation of 
organism to environment. Hence the conduct which pro- 
motes this adjustment is good, and the more it promotes it 
the better the conduct becomes. Moral progress is thus 
movement towards the " ideal congruity," which is the life of 
"the completely adapted man in the completely evolved 
society." But the struggle towards this end is a process 
which creates the moral sense. "Experiences of utility, or- 
ganized and consolidated during all past generations of the 
human race, have been producing nervous modifications " ; 
and these, " by continued transmission and accumulation," 
have become in us instincts or intuitions which discern the fit 
action, and create the feeling of obligation. In this process, 
of course, actions which differentiate pleasures are qualita- 
tively distinguished, the higher being the more conservative 
of life, the lower the less ; and so the total result is an 
evolution of ethics that are in a sense at once intuitional and 
empirical, showing the moral experience of the race realized 



72 ARE ACQUIRED QUALITIES TRANSMITTED? 

and articulated in the character and conduct of the indi- 
vidual and in the organization of society. 

2. On the relation of evolution to ethics as thus stated 
it may be remarked : 

(i.) The question of time is not so vital as it seems. The 
past into which we are taken is not living but dead ; it is 
largely the past of organisms that were, as imagined by 
minds that are. The problem concerns mind, but by no pro- 
cess can we out of petrified bones get a mental psychology. 
The past we recreate is made in our own image ; it is turned 
into a stupendous man, individualized, personified. And 
when that is done, what is brought out of it is only what we 
have put into it ; it is a past read not as it lived in fact, but 
as it lives in the mind of the speculative thinker. In other 
words, the length of time during which the creative process 
endures does not make the creation less miraculous, espe- 
cially as the mind which dreams the process is not explained 
by its dreams. 

(ii.) We have to take evolution here with the important 
modern qualification that the transmission of acquired charac- 
ters or qualities is a very dubious hypothesis. The younger 
evolutionists argue that you have no right to call into 
operation more causes than are necessary to explain the 
facts. The phenomena which the enormous apparatus of 
heredity is invoked to explain, can, they say, be explained 
without it. If heredity were true, then what would be the 
result? If acquired characters survived and were transmitted, 
what manner of beings should we be ? The most marvellous 
thing in evolution is not what we do inherit, but what we 
do not, the fact being that it is only the most infinitesimal 
part of all that distinguished the parent which descends to 
the child : in other words, the thing which most needs to be 
explained is net the possibility of acquired characters being 
transmitted, but the certainty that the major part of them 
will perish. It is pathetic and significant that the thing the 



DIFFERENCE MORE THAN IDENTITY 73 

child most needs and would most profit by, the experience of 
the parent, is the very thing it does not receive, but has to 
gain for itself in the bitter way common to all its ancestors. 

(iii.) It has to be noted that throughout the whole pro- 
cess we apply a standard of judgment that involves a theory 
of values. For what permits the theory of evolution to be 
applied to man and society ? It is increased differentiation. 
Now in this case to what are we to affix the value ? To the 
origin ? To the process of differentiation ? To the thing 
differentiated ? or to the inheritance ? If, for example, a new 
organ appears differentiating one member of a species from 
all the others, and if this organ becomes the parent of an 
entirely new species of organisms, what is the significant 
thing? It is not the points in which the new and the 
old species agree, but the points in which they differ. To 
apply this to the case in hand : if we have to measure man's 
ethical ideas by any reasonable standard, it should be not by 
their affinity with the instincts of real or imaginary creatures 
below him or of imagined ancestors behind him ; but rather 
by the qualities which distinguish his character and conduct 
from theirs. In other words, it is the point of distinction, not 
of similarity, which is the great thing. Love of offspring is 
common to a man and a lion. The feeling that compels 
the parent to seek food for his offspring exists in both ; 
but in the man the obligation to maintain his offspring is 
qualitatively different from what it is in the lion, involving 
duties educational, social, ethical, which belong to a world 
higher than the animal. The lion is not bound to perish 
rather than not find food ; the man may be so bound : the 
lion's duties are bounded by his den ; the man's by human- 
ity. The differentiation in this case is the important point ; 
and as here, so throughout. And this means that the 
difference in what the man creates from what the man in- 
herits may be more and greater than all his inheritance. It 
is evident, therefore, that man does more to interpret the 



74 SOCIETY ADJUSTED TO THE IDEAL 

process that is behind him than the process has done for 
the interpretation of man. 

(iv.) The end or law which governs the process, the need 
of adjusting internal to external relations, of adapting organ- 
ism to environment, inverts the order of thought and nature. 
The obligation that lies on moral beings is not to adjust 
themselves to their environment, but to adjust their environ- 
ment to the higher ideal which they bring to it. Harmony 
between the social medium and the social unit is not the 
ultimate measure of conduct ; to argue as if it were is to turn 
circumstances into the master as well as the maker of con- 
science. And this means that before we can speak of this 
adjustment as good we have to adjust the society or the 
medium to an idea of the good which was before it and is 
distinct from it ; i.e. we judge both the environment and the 
organism, because we apply to both an ideal standard which 
expresses our notion of what both ought to be. This ideal 
is native to us, lives inseparably in us, and is developed from 
the reason we are. It compels us to seek the amelioration/ of 
society as well as the improvement of self, and so aims at the 
adjustment of the two not simply to each other but to a 
more absolute law. Mr. Spencer's doctrine thus leaves us 
with an end which neither explains the beginning nor brings 
us face to face with the forces that have carried men so far 
towards it. The mystery of the moral ideal and moral 
obligation lies in man rather than in his environment. 

§ IV. What do Moral Judgments Involve ? 

Let us now, in the face ot these discussions and distinc- 
tions, go back to our problem, and see precisely what are 
the points that need to be explained. Man is a doer of 
deeds which are distinguished by their ethical qualities. 
They can be tested by moral standards ; they are subjects 
for moral judgment. What do these judgments mean ? 
What is their source and basis ? Why among all the crea^ 



MAN AND MORAL JUDGMENTS 75 

tures that live is a moral standard applied to man alone and 
everywhere and always by man to men ? The questions in- 
volved may be reduced to three. First, is man capable of 
directing his own conduct ? is he able to do actions which 
have moral qualities ? Secondly, what standard have we to 
apply in order to the differentiation or qualification of his 
actions ? Thirdly, why is he bound to do acts of a certain 
quality, and to leave undone acts of other and different 
qualities ? In other words, our questions concern Freedom, 
Right, and Duty : whether man is or is not a free agent ; 
whether he has or has not faculties or standards which 
qualify him to use his freedom ; and whether he has or has 
not any feeling or sense of obligation as to their use. 

1. We begin with the question as to his power ; this is 
fundamental. Where there is no ability there can be no obli- 
gation ; what lies outside a man's power does not lie within a 
man's duty. Nay, more, without this freedom or ability man 
becomes a mere natural being, no more a subject of moral 
judgment than the brute. It is by virtue of his power to 
determine his own choice or to elect his own lines of conduct 
that he is to be praised or blamed for the thing he does. 
Now it is remarkable and characteristic that those who have 
made ethics the creation of experience, who have attempted 
to resolve them into the acquired instincts of the organism 
that has had to struggle for life, have done so on the explicit 
or implicit ground that man was without moral freedom, a 
creature of circumstances, a child of motive, governed by his 
love of the agreeable, which conserved life, or his dislike of 
the disagreeable, which threatened it. In the endeavour to 
maintain this position, a distinction has been drawn between 
freedom of will and freedom of action. Freedom of will has 
been denied ; freedom of action has been affirmed ; but 
freedom of action without freedom of choice is only a form 
of necessity. It means the capability of a thing to be moved, 
rather than the ability of a person to move ; it belongs rather 



76 FREEDOM TO OBEY MOTIVES 

to the field of physics than of ethics. The motive is a cause 
which exacts its equivalent effect in the choice. Freedom in 
this sense does not mean that man has the power of initia- 
tion, but only that he has the capacity of responsive movement, 
can act if he is acted on. Now we must here distinguish what 
is necessary as an occasion for choice from what is sufficient 
to cause it. Freedom has been denied to will on the ground 
that motives are necessary to choice ; but while motives may 
be necessary they need not necessitate. Jonathan Edwards, 
indeed, argued that the will always is as the strongest motive 
is ; but he did that on the express ground that will is 
the same as desire, inclination, the most agreeable, — that 
motive is, in short, emotion. But it is of the very essence 
of the argument that the will selects motives, motives do 
not select the will. If the will always is as the strongest 
motive is, then man has no choice to be other than what the 
motives which come to him make him. The responsibility 
for himself is not his, it belongs to the motives that sur- 
round and find him. If so, amelioration of character must 
depend upon amelioration of circumstances. Thus as the 
man is he must remain, unless he be re-made by the maker 
of his motives, or, in a word, his environment. For only 
through a change in his circumstances can any change come 
to him ; and so the way to effect conversion will be to place, 
the bad man where no evil motives can reach him, and the 
good man where only bad motives can find him. But this 
way is an impossible way, for the man carries his motives 
within him ; they go where he goes, for they are part of his 
very self. For, as Coleridge said, it is not the motive that 
makes the man, but the man the motive. Granted a good 
man, a bad motive cannot sway him ; granted a bad man, a 
good motive will not find him. Thus it is not true that the 
will always is as the strongest motive is, but it is true that 
the motive is as is the man, and what' the man is is more a 
matter of will than of circumstances. 



THE FREEDOM OF BURIDAN'S ASS 77 

The bondage of the will were indeed fatal to the judgment 
that holds man responsible for his acts, and approves or dis- 
approves according to their special quality. If motives de- 
termine action, the fable of Buridan's Ass ceases to be 
fabulous. It is possible to conceive alternatives where the 
motives are so equally balanced that the will would be com- 
pelled to remain in a state of complete equilibrium, incap- 
able of inclining either to the right hand or to the left. But 
while will is not necessitated by motives, motives are neces- 
sary to choice ; for it is the very essence of rational freedom 
to demand a reason why it should act. If there were no 
reason,, choice could not be rational ; it would be an accident 
or a chance. But there is nothing so little arbitrary as a 
rational will ; where it is not the arbitrary must be ; for the 
free will acts in view of reasons, and would not be rational if 
it could choose without them. 

Still the reality of freedom lies deeper than argument. 
Nature witnesses to it ; man blames himself when he does 
wrong because he believes himself to have voluntarily chosen 
the worse when he could have taken the better. Law judges 
a man most severely when it holds him to have freely com- 
mitted the crime with which he is charged. Responsibility is 
not a vicarious thing, where a necessitated victim bears the 
blame of ancestral or social sins ; but it means that man is to 
be judged for a thing or act he himself willed to do. He is 
tried alike by God and man upon the principle which each 
individual conscience authenticates — that he whose action is 
in question did it when he could have done otherwise ; and 
he was then bound to do as he could have done. 

But while freedom is a sine qud non of moral action and 
implied in all moral judgments, it has here a further signifi- 
cance : — it qualifies the argument from the transmitted ex- 
periences of the past. For what a man inherits leaves him 
still a free man ; the judgment he has to bear is for his own 
act, and not for the acts of his ancestry, even though they 



78 HAPPINESS AND THE IDEA OF RIGHT 

may have created in him tendencies which are not easily 
resisted. These tendencies do not cancel freedom, only con- 
dition it ; they define the limits of responsibility, but while 
they may qualify they do not annul it, for its ground stands 
unbroken. But in doing this his freedom does much more ; 
it lifts man above the chain of physical causation, and makes 
him the symbol of a being higher than the forces that are 
governed by mechanical necessity. For since he is free he 
stands in conduct in the same transcendental relation to the 
forces and laws of Nature as he does in knowledge to her 
qualities and objects. His freedom is the correlate of his. 
thought ; and as the man who knows phenomena is not one 
of the phenomena he knows, so the will that can initiate 
action is not a mere event or link in a series of antecedents 
and sequents, where each follows the other either without 
perceived connection or in a rigorous order of physical causa- 
tion. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena 
of space, Will is transcendence as regards the events of time ; 
the double transcendence involves the complete supernatural 
character of man. 

2. But we come next to the idea of the right. What is it 
and whence is it ? We have seen that those who would give 
a strictly naturalistic account of ethics have attempted to ex- 
plain the right as the agreeable, or, to use the very precise and 
definite language of John Stuart Mill, " Actions are right in 
proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they 
tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is 
intended pleasure and the absence of pain ; by unhappiness 
pain and the privation of pleasure." } A sentence like this is- 
quite without significance until the terms "pleasure" and 
" happiness " be defined, and until we have determined 
whether pleasure or happiness be one and uniform, or varied 
in kind and quality. There are really three questions which 

1 Mill, " Utilitarianism," Ethics, p. 91 (Douglas' ed.). 



HAPPINESS AND ITS SORTS 79 

such a sentence directly suggests : what is happiness ? what 
sort of happiness ? whose happiness ? 

(a) What is happiness? It is an infinite thing, so infinite 
that no man can tell its forms, enumerate or measure its 
varieties. There is happiness which is mere sensual indul- 
gence, and happiness which is intellectual enjoyment. There 
is the happiness of the savage, who lies and suns himself, 
gorged, on the bank ; of the serious student, who lives in the 
study and among his books ; of the speculator, who gambles 
in stocks and shares ; of the strenuous athlete, who feels as 
if his soul were in his muscles or his limbs ; of the nouveau 
riche, who feels as if recognition by Society were admission 
into heaven. Unless we define happiness, how can we speak 
of it ? And if we qualify it, we introduce distinctions not 
contained within the idea itself, but drawn from another and 
higher sphere. For Happiness, unqualified, is the most 
absolutely insignificant term in the whole vocabulary of philo- 
sophy or of literature ; and it is therefore signally unsuitable 
when made to play the part of ultimate arbiter as regards 
the qualities which make actions right or wrong. 

(/3) What sort of happiness ? Is it sensuous ? Is it in- 
tellectual ? Is it ethical or social ? Is it " comfort " which 
seems to so many Englishmen the only real paradise ? 
As we have seen that quality is a needful element in the 
definition of Happiness, we find it to be also needful in 
the differentiation and appraisement of its kinds. For the 
sorts of happiness are innumerable, just as the persons who 
may be happy or miserable represent not only in number 
but in grade all degrees of capacity. Is then happiness a 
thing we can quantify as well as qualify ? If we use it 
as an ethical measure or standard, must we not in our 
reasoning add mass to quality? Is the greatest quantity 
of a lower quality of happiness to be preferred to a smaller 
quantity of a higher quality, or, on the contrary, is quality 
to be preferred to quantity ? . Then what or who is to 



80 WHOSE HAPPINESS TO BE PROMOTED? 

determine the sort of happiness to which superior and 
determinative excellence belongs ? Is it the man ? Is it the 
fashion of the passing society ? or is it some standard apart 
from both, and more permanent and universal than either? 
In other words, it is impossible to begin to distinguish 
between sorts of happiness without introducing a standard 
by which happiness can be measured. But where a standard 
is introduced, it is distinguished from what it measures, and 
is held to be higher than it ; and so happiness, as some- 
thing which is itself determined, cannot be determinative 
of the quality of the action whose character it was thought 
to decide. 

(7) But suppose we have found and agreed upon some 
method of differentiating or testing the quality of pleasures, 
we are at once met by the question, Whose is the happiness 
that I am to promote ? My own ? My family's ? My coun- 
try's ? My kind's ? If these be inconsistent, who is to decide 
between them ? If I am to promote my family's happiness, it 
may be at the sacrifice of my own. If I am to promote my 
country's happiness, it may be at the expense of my family's. 
If I am to promote the happiness of my kind, it may be by 
turning against my own country, and playing what would be 
by many described as a treacherous or an unpatriotic part. 
How are these things to be determined, or the particular 
persons whose happiness I am to promote to be found out ? 
But further, if I give up my personal pleasure to promote 
that of any of those just named, what guarantee have I that 
theirs will be promoted, or that in doing so I am not reduc- 
ing by the sacrifice of my own or my family's or my coun- 
try's the sum total of happiness in the universe ? If I so 
serve this generation as to increase its pleasure, may I not 
be doing it at the expense, say, of my own health, or the 
health of generations that are to come after me, especially 
those that may spring from my own loins ? And the matter 
may become very urgent, for the question, Whose plea- 



WHENCE THE SENSE OF OBLIGATION? 81 

sure ? blends also with this other, What sort of pleasure ? 
Is it the Queen's in the palace ? Is it the peasant's in the 
hut ? Is it the greatest happiness of the capitalist or of the 
workman ? Nay, is it the greatest happiness of the greatest 
number ? But who is to estimate the number ? Who is to 
tell the happiness? Is the greatest number to tell me what 
it is, or am I to tell the greatest number what its happiness 
is or ought to be ? And how am I to find out the acts that 
will either fulfil my notions of what the greatest happiness of 
the greatest number is or ought to be, or what they conceive 
their own happiness most distinctively to consist in ? 

It seems then as if pleasure were a completely imprac- 
ticable standard of the right, and as if we must find 
one more capable of application to all the varieties of 
human action and conduct, or abandon in despair the effort 
to discover what is right or good. 

3. But there is not only the power to do the right and 
the right to be done, there is the obligation to do it. The 
word Duty, or, put into its concrete form, Conscience — how 
do we come into the possession of this ? Whence the feel- 
ing of obligation, the idea represented by that imperious 
word " ought " ? Suppose that the happiness of the greatest 
number is the standard of right, the question remains, Why 
am I bound to promote it ? We may be told that the sense 
of obligation is, as it were, the social sanction worked into 
our consciousness and woven into feeling ; the authority of 
society translated into a personal judgment. Suppose this 
were so, how or by what process is the social sanction got 
into the man ? The process of incorporation may be repre- 
sented in some such form as this : the social sanction, it may 
be said, is implanted in us because society educates us ; and 
having found out what was most for its own good, it instils 
into us by law and education, by convention and custom, its 
idea of what acts are suitable or appropriate to its needs 
or conducive to its well-being. This process of instillation is 

P.C.R. 6 



82 CONSCIENCE AND SOCIETY 

so subtle and so completely carried out that the man cannot 
separate the judgment of society within him from himself. 
It has been made a part and parcel of his own being, and so 
he judges himself just as if he were collective society 
personalized. 

Well, now, suppose we grant this, and grant also another 
thing, that society has by an extraordinary exercise of 
arithmetical genius so worked out the terms of the ethical 
calculus that it can tell which among all possible acts most 
makes for its happiness, and which acts most make for its 
misery, what then ? Is the phenomenon of duty, are the 
phenomena of conscience, explained ? On the contrary, 
wherein consists their permanent and pre-eminent peculiarity? 
In this, that man feels, when most bound by conscience, most 
independent of society, — bound to do the thing which duty 
imperiously commands, even though society may imperiously 
forbid. If the man be a religious man and the society also 
in earnest about its own view of religion and against his, his 
defiance of its judgment and its sanctions may involve his 
going to the stake. And how does his conscience show its 
quality ? In compelling him to go to the stake rather than 
submit to society. If he is a statesman, and society pre- 
scribes a policy which he disapproves, what is he bound to 
do ? Accept the authority of his own conscience or of 
society ? Would he gain or lose respect by publicly profess- 
ing to regard the voice of the State, in opposition to his 
own moral judgment, as the voice of God ? Is not the dis- 
tinctive peculiarity of conscience this : — that if it commands 
a policy or mode of conduct or expression of opinion that 
may make a man a social outcast and bring upon him in 
their severest form all the penalties which the social sanction 
may be able to enforce, yet there is expected from him, all 
the more rather than the less, full and unqualified obedience 
to its behests ? 

But though this is a point which we may leave as a 



MAN AND THE SOCIAL SANCTION 83 

problem to the hedonist, let us proceed a little further, 
and suppose that the man has been got to occupy the 
standpoint of society, to look at himself through its eyes 
rather than his own, and that society has succeeded in in- 
corporating its judgment in the feeling which he calls his 
conscience, how is that judgment to become to him a law ? 
How is that to be translated into a categorical imperative? 
Fear of the social sanction cannot do it, for we have just 
seen how easily and how often in the highest and most 
imperious cases that sanction may be defied. And may not 
a man of lower quality than the martyr or the sufferer for 
conscience' sake reasonably argue thus? — "Society is an 
immense and continuous organism, while I am a humble 
and ephemeral unit. My happiness is a far greater thing 
to me than society's can ever be to it, for it is impossible 
that the whole of society can by a single act be made 
miserable as I may be, not only for this m :>ment but for all 
the moments that are to come of my ephemeral being. How 
then is it possible for me to contribute better to the sum 
total of happiness than by increasing the amount of my 
own ? " And would not that man's argument, whether re- 
garded from the standpoint of the most enlightened self- 
interest or from that of social interest, be valid and invin- 
cible ? And so we are left by this philosophy as completely 
without an authority to enforce duty as without a good to 
be realized or any ability to realize it. 

§ V. The Ethical Man means an Ethical Universe : 
Butler and Kant 

I. If now Freedom, Right, and Duty cannot be construed 
as creations of experience, whether individual or collective, it 
follows that they either represent or are integral elements 
of human nature, involved in its very idea and evolved 
in its evolution. But that which is integral to man is 



84 THE ETHICAL MAN 

no less integral to his universe. What is in him is not 
independent of what is without him, but repeats and reflects 
it, lives in him in active intercourse with what is above and 
around him, just as his organism lives within and through its 
environment, absorbing into itself the elements without that 
are needful to growth and health within. The same law 
holds in the ethical as in the physical region, and, as we have 
seen, also in the intellectual. As the intellect implies the in- 
telligible medium in which it lives, so we can conceive a personal 
conscience only where it can express a universal law, and 
moral freedom only where there is a supreme ethical Will to 
govern. Without this correspondence of man's nature with 
the constitution of the universe in which he lives moral life 
would not be possible to him, nor would obedience bring the 
harmony between personal will and imperative law which is 
the very notion of beatitude. 

Two great ethical thinkers — Butler and Kant — may be 
taken as exponents of certain deductions which follow from 
the ethical position here maintained. They are instruct- 
ive alike in their agreements and in their differences. They 
agree, first, that there is a law ultimate and absolute in- 
corporated in the nature of man : ultimate, because it neither 
asks nor gives a reason for its dictates, but simply commands ; 
absolute, for while it speaks in the individual its tone is that 
of the universal, of a sovereign endowed with perfect right 
and manifest authority. They agree, secondly, that this law 
is immediate ; nothing comes between it and the man ; it 
speaks with him face to face, enforces duty and allows no 
intermediary to qualify or repeal its authority. Thirdly, it is 
so intrinsic and essential in its character that without it the 
person is not a man, through it he becomes human ; by 
obedience he achieves humanity. 

Both of these eminent thinkers, then, saw that the con- 
ception of the intrinsic and essential morality of man 
involved similar elements in the universe ; but each works 



IN AN ETHICAL UNIVERSE 85 

out the principle with characteristic differences. Kant is the 
more formal and scholastic in method, Butler the more 
cautious and suggestive in statement. Kant combines with 
his critical doubts as to the competence of the pure reason 
in the region of transcendental dialectic, a rigorous dogmatism 
in the conclusions of his ethical logic ; but Butler so feels the 
range and reality of our ignorance that he insinuates rather 
than draws his more certain or assured inferences. Kant's 
interests are intellectual, and even where he is most the 
moralist he does not cease to be the philosopher ; but Butler's 
main concern is religion ; and when he is most the philosopher, 
he still remains the divine. Kant's philosophy is critical 
because he feels at every moment its antithesis to the old 
dogmatic rationalism ; Butler's theology is apologetical, for 
he never forgets the deism which is the fashionable belief of 
his day, or the men who have found their way through a 
relaxed faith into laxity of morals. These differences of 
method and mental attitude are reflected in their respective 
arguments. 

2. Butler's argument exists in two forms, a positive or 
didactic, and an apologetical or polemical. We find the 
former in the Sermons, the latter in the Analogy. In the 
Sermons his philosophy is a Christian Stoicism. Men ought 
to live according to Nature, which is not acting as we please, 
but doing as we ought, obeying our legitimate sovereign, the 
Conscience, making it the whole business of our lives, as it 
is absolutely the whole business of a moral agent, to con- 
form ourselves to it. " This is what the ancient precept 
means, Reverence thyself. It is the essence of a system to 
be an one or a whole made up of several parts," but the 
parts can be a whole only as they form an one. A watch 
is a whole composed of many parts, yet made a unity for 
the measuring of time by the all-pervading and controlling 
mainspring ; and men and societies are multitudes which 
are reduced to system, or units made into unity by the com- 



86 MORAL LAW IN THE INDIVIDUAL 

mon yet individuated empire of the conscience which regu- 
lates life and defines its end. And they have been so 
constituted by the Creator, for Butler conceives that "follow- 
ing Nature " and " obeying the voice of God " are not two 
things, but one and the same. In the Analogy these ideas 
are elaborated into a defence of those religious truths which 
teach belief in a future life, the providence and government 
of God here and hereafter, the life that now is as a scene 
and period Of probation, and the need of a revelation to 
make this life what it ought to be in view of the life to 
come. We may therefore represent the argument as having 
unfolded itself before the mind of the English divine in 
terms somewhat like these : " The law which is everywhere 
incorporated in man implies a Lawgiver. While it lives and 
speaks in the individual, it is yet distributed through the 
whole ; and this universality is only the more distinctly ex- 
pressed in the severe individualism under which it is realized. 
For it signifies that the law is so essential to human nature 
that it must be incorporated in the unit in order that it may 
be the more completely and universally evolved from him into 
the unity ; but it could not be complete and universal were 
it simply incorporated in the whole in order that it might be 
impressed from without upon the unit. The order that is 
made by external pressure may be mechanical, but is not 
organic ; it may be political, but it is not moral. The highest 
order springs from the harmony of all the units, which 
means that the outward and inward so correspond that the 
individual can be worked into a system that completely 
satisfies every personal and realizes every collective end. 
The essential unity of a State is not secured by the sove- 
reign, but by those remarkable unities incorporated in each 
individual that we term blood, descent, language, tradition, 
belief. It is an ideal thing which custom may express, but 
legislation cannot create. The alphabet is in every educated 
man ; it lies at the root of his knowledge of his own tongue. 






ARTICULATED INTO A MORAL SOCIETY 87 

His knowledge of that tongue lies at the root of his enjoyment 
of its literature, his appreciation of its poetry, its history and 
its science. Without that knowledge its literature would 
speak to him in vain. Similarly, the moral law of the universe 
is impersonated in its moral units. It is over all men because 
it is in all. There has therefore been a common Lawgiver ; 
and this Lawgiver must have also been Creator, for He who 
made man made also the law in and with the man ; and He 
who made both law and man administers the law by judging 
the man. He is therefore sovereign ; the system we live 
under He instituted, and the life we live under it is one of 
probation, lived that we may give in an account to Him who 
rules His universe by enforcing His laws." 
; 3. Kant's argument differed considerably from Butler's 
especially as it made Deity one of several deductions from the 
moral law — the highest in a trinity of consequences from its 
supremacy. The stress he laid upon duty in his Practical 
Philosophy was a sort of compensation for the argumentative 
impotence of his Speculative. The intensity of Kant's moral 
convictions, the severity of his doctrine, the force with 
which he preached duty to an age that did not love it,, 
entitles him to something more than the regard we give to- 
the father of that critical and transcendental philosophy which 
has done more to educate and uplift Mind than any purely^ 
speculative school the world has known since the days of 
Plato. Kant starts from the position that the only thing 
good without qualification is the good will ; and that will is 
good which acts from duty and not simply from inclination,, 
duty being respect for law and obedience to it. This law as- 
moral is absolute in its authority. It is a categorical impera- 
tive expressed in an unconditioned "thou shalt." The cate- 
gorical is distinguished from the hypothetical imperative in 
not being consequential, or something dependent on a prior 
principle or condition. It simply speaks the thing that man 
is bound to do, every individual act being the expression of 
a universal principle or duty. 



88 FREEDOM, IMMORTALITY, GOD 

From this absolute categorical imperative three things 
followed : — (a) freedom ; where the obligation is absolute the 
power possessed must be equal to its performance. The 
being it commands could not, in respect of what is com- 
manded, be under the control of any merely natural or ex- 
ternal force. Only where " thou canst " may be said is " thou 
oughtest" possible. But though the will be free it is not 
blind ; its choices are not arbitrary. Hence every moral act 
must have an end — the highest good. This good consists of 
two elements — virtue and felicity or happiness. If either be 
absent, the good is not realized. But the two are inseparable | 
virtue is a necessary condition of felicity, felicity the natural 
crown of virtue. 

But now (/3) this cannot be realized within the terms and 
under the limitations of our empirical existence. Hence im- 
mortality follows as the second deduction from the ethical 
postulate. The moral law demands perfect virtue or holiness ; 
but a mortal being cannot realize moral perfection or a holy 
completeness of nature and conduct within the bounds of his 
mortal life. If, then, there is to be virtue, there must be 
immortal existence. The law that demands perfect virtue 
guarantees immortality as a condition for its realization. 

But (7) to freedom and immortality God must be added. 
For if there is to be happiness, the felicity that crowns virtue 
and turns it into the supreme good, there must be con- 
ditions favourable to its being. But these conditions can 
be realized only where nature and will work together in 
harmony ; i.e. while the moral law is independent of nature, 
nature in all its conditions must serve the moral law if felicity 
is to be complete. But this service man is unable to compel ; 
the only being able to compel it is Deity ; for He alone is 
Master of Nature. He then is as necessary as freedom and 
immortality to man's highest good. These, then, are the 
necessary postulates of the practical reason, the logical impli- 
cates of the categorical imperative: Freedom, Immortality, 



AND THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE 89 

God. They may be no objects of speculative knowledge, but 
they are objects of the rational faith, whose being is grounded 
in the categorical imperative and guaranteed by it. And the 
faith they warrant is that the ethical man lives in an ethical 
universe ; the moral nature which is essential to man moral- 
izes his universe. 

§ VI. Deductions and Conclusion 

The difference between the two arguments is perhaps more 
formal than substantial, a matter of formal logic rather than 
metaphysical principle. Butler does not emphasize freedom 
as strongly as Kant, but he holds it as firmly, while he con- 
ceives immortality and God to be necessary to probation 
here and beatitude hereafter ; and, therefore, to be clear and 
indubitable implicates of his moral interpretation of Nature. 
And with Kant the subordination or argumentative depend- 
ence of Deity upon the categorical imperative is more logical 
than real. The system as a whole hangs together. Subjec- 
tively, the ultimate, the thing of which we are supremely 
conscious if we are conscious of ourselves at all, is the 
sovereignty of conscience ; but objectively, the reality which 
is the correlate of our ultimate consciousness, is a universe in 
which God is Sovereign. We may then deduce from this 
ethical dialectic principles that ought to carry us to conclu- 
sions of the first importance for our present discussion. 

I. Man as moral, and therefore free, stands above nature, 
even while he seems within it. The will involves another 
order of transcendence than belongs to the intellect ; for it is 
a much higher and more complex transcendence to stand in 
act and character above the order or succession of mechanical 
sequences than in the act of cognition to unify phenomena. 
Man, in short, is no mere physical or natural effect ; he is a 
moral cause. As a moral cause he possesses the power of 
initiative. He is not simply made by the past ; he is the 



90 MORAL WILL CREATIVE 

present, and he helps to make the future. The increase of 
moral good in the world is as possible as the increase of 
energy is impossible, and moral good is the direct creation of 
moral will. Physical forces, so far as they are conceived as 
causes, pass into their effects ; the change produced is the 
exact equivalent of the energy expended. But there is no 
such exact equivalence between moral causes and their 
effects. The will is a permanent force, not exhausted by a 
single choice or any number of choices, but ever creative, 
ever re-creative, making conditions which not only allow, 
but promote and demand the existence of higher things. 
The correlative of the indestructibility of matter is, if we 
may so phrase it, its increatability ; it can be as little made 
as destroyed, but remains a stable quantity, though with 
infinite instability as to mode. But these terms cannot be 
used of either good will or moral good. There may be 
an indefinite multiplication of good wills, and in moral 
good an infinite upward progression. In this region every 
person of higher excellence than the society into which he 
is born, every nobler ideal realized, every new virtue or finer 
type of old virtues achieved, every grace added to humanity, — 
is an increase of the good stored in the world and the direct 
outcome of the moral will. This will stands, therefore, as an 
initiative force, a centre of creative action, able not only to 
effect or suffer changes, but even to augment in quantity and 
improve in quality what it found in existence. 

2. Man further transcends nature by carrying within him- 
self the law he is bound to obey. The code of ethics which 
he makes for himself out of himself differentiates him from 
every merely natural being ; and it signifies that it is by 
transcending nature that he becomes himself. He progresses 
by self-realization. This self is not empirical, does not grow 
out of experience, but is transcendental, makes experience ; 
and is never satisfied with the experience gained, but ever 
strives after the unrealized. Hence there is something uni- 



POSSIBLE INCREASE OF GOOD 91 

versal in the Ego ; it is never a mere enclosed or shut-in 
individual, but a person of one substance not only with the 
race of man, but with the whole of reason everywhere. 
Hence man, within the physical conditions that limit him 
and seem to reduce him to the hue and mode of his environ- 
ment, creates conditions — intellectual, ethical, social — which 
contend against those imposed upon him by nature. Over 
against its pitiless struggle for life he creates a passion for 
well-doing, the mercy whose quality is not strained, the " truth 
that worketh by love," " the hope that maketh not ashamed," 
"the love that rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the 
truth." And the qualities that do most to perfect his person- 
ality contribute most to the creation of the higher ethical 
conditions ; so much so that the degree in which he trans- 
cends nature tends to humanize even her most brutal forces. 

3. Since man as active will and immanent law trans- 
cends nature, he cannot be measured by it. Generalizations 
based upon the study of nature ought not to be used to 
determine what is or is not possible to him. The laws under 
which phenomena may be grouped do not apply to persons 
who are more than phenomenal, who are the noumena through 
which all phenomena are. The natural law of the Roman 
j urist was not an actual thing, nor was the perfect man of the 
Roman Stoic an actual person. They were ideals, but they 
were not unreal because they were not actual ; rather they 
were all the more real that they were so ideal. Natural Law 
meant the abstract justice and right, the ideal equity of the 
human reason, which could be so applied to the concrete and 
positive Law as to make it less cruel in its enactments, less 
severe in its judgments, less barbarous in its modes and 
instruments — in a word, more just and more humane. The 
Perfect Man was an ideal of goodness, which was so presented 
to actual men as to tempt them to live more worthily and 
to aspire more wholly after better things. So man transcen- 
dent is man ideal, above nature while within it, able to ex- 



92 MORAL PERSONALITIES ARE 

plain it, incapable of explanation by it. And if we find the 
ideal of the Perfect Man realized, must we not conceive him 
in whom it is impersonated as essentially supernatural in 
quality, and in intrinsic worth of being above anything which 
nature can produce ? 

4. Since the moral law is immanent in man and realized 
by his will, it follows that all moralgood is personal in its 
source, originates with persons, is realized in persons, and is 
by means of persons incorporated in the laws, institutions, 
and agencies which protect, preserve, and develop it. There 
is, indeed, no factor of change or cause of progress known 
to history or human experience equal in efficiency to the 
great personality — the man who embodies some creative 
and causal idea. It is not nearly so true that great move- 
ments or moments produce great men as that the men create 
the moments. The wars of the world bear the marks of their 
leaders ; and each has been glorious or ignoble, brilliant 
or disgraceful, just as its captain has been. What is the 
history of art but the biographies of great artists ? Where 
would Greek sculpture have been without Pheidias, or modern 
painting without Raphael, or music without the Masters ? 
Has not science been made by certain supreme minds, dis- 
coveries by certain daring explorers, political order and ideas 
elaborated and embodied in politics by genius in the form 
of statesmen ? It is personality that counts in all things, 
and most of all in that concentrated form of moral good which 
we call religion. For religion has at once this distinction 
and value : it is moral good under its most august and 
sovereign aspect, as it affects man's inmost being and ulti- 
mate relations. It is good sub specie ceternitatis, enlarging 
mortal into immortal being, and reconciling man to himself 
and to the whole infinite order, which dignifies him by 
making him needful to its completeness. In this realm 
there is no great and no small, for all the categories are 
infinite and all the ends are divine. 



CREATIONS AND AGENTS OF GOD 93 

5. If, then, man, by his moral being touches the skirts of 
God, and God in enforcing His law is ever, by means of 
great persons, shaping the life of man to its diviner issues, 
what could be more consonant, alike with man's nature 
and God's method of forming or re-forming it, than that He 
should send a supreme Personality as the vehicle of highest 
good to the race ? Without such a Personality the moral 
forces of time would lack unity, and without unity they 
would be without organization, purpose or efficiency. If a 
Person has appeared in history who has achieved such a posi- 
tion and fulfilled such functions, how can He be more fitly 
described than as the Son of God and the Saviour of man ? 



CHAPTER III 
THE QUESTION AS AFFECTED BY THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 

A. Historical and Critical 

§ I. Hodev to kclkov ; 
^HE doctrine that man's nature embodies a moral ideal 



i. nni 



which he is bound to realize, is more easy to believe 
and to vindicate when stated in the abstract than when set 
face to face with the facts of life. For, as a matter of experi- 
ence, man has not realized the moral ideal. If theology 
knows depravity, history is acquainted with cruelty and 
wickedness in high places and in low ; ethics are as familiar 
with vice as religion is with sin ; and philosophy has no 
harder or more obstinate questions than those connected with 
the origin and the existence of evil. Indeed there is no 
problem that has so perplexed our finest spirits, reducing 
some to silent despair, rousing some to eloquent doubt, and 
forcing not a few into unbelief ; while probably a multitude no 
man can number have saved faith by forcing their reason to 
sit dumb and blind before the mystery it could not penetrate 
or unravel. One of the most beautiful and pious spirits it 
has ever been my privilege to know, was a man who had 
been trained to the office of the preacher, who had distin- 
guished himself as a scholar and as a thinker, and who had 
become the hope of his college, his professors, and his Church. 
One day it fell to him to proclaim in public what he had 
tried to learn in the study and in the classroom ; but, as he 
stood and faced the upturned eyes of men, there came such 

94 



SUFFERING AND DOUBT 95 

a vision of the evils that filled life and the impotence of the 
Will which seemed to rule the world, as well as of the 
preacher and of the word he preached either to mend or 
to end them, that he vowed unto the God in whose goodness 
he still believed, that were he only allowed to escape with his 
reason from that appalling place, he would not again lift up 
his voice in a pulpit until he had a message better fitted for 
the supreme crisis of the soul sojourning amid scenes so 
confused and perplexing. That message never came to him, 
and he retired into a silence that nothing could tempt him to 
break, vanquished by the potency of evil. 

Another and more distinguished thinker has charged nature 
with perpetrating on the most stupendous scale every crime 
and cruelty man has ever been guilty of: " Nature impales 
men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be de- 
voured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them 
with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with 
hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or 
slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other 
hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a 
Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed." And he has made out 
a dread catalogue of the deeds which " Nature does with the 
most supercilious disregard both of mercy and justice," end- 
ing with " the hurricane and the pestilence " which overmatch 
" anarchy and the Reign of Terror " " in injustice, ruin, and 
death." L That indictment by John Stuart Mill may, as was 
long ago noted, recall the famous stanzas of Tennyson on 
the man — 

"Who trusted God was love indeed, 
And love creation's final law — 
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravin, shrieked against his creed." 

But while there is in both an equal feeling of the savagery 
of nature, there was not in Mill any sense of the " love 

1 J. S. Mill, Essays on Religion, pp. 29-31. 



96 THE VISION OF MORAL EVIL 

indeed." It was the conflict of nature's way with man's 
sense of justice that compelled him to judge her so terribly ; 
it was not its contradiction to a heart of infinite pity in the 
God who had made man. 

2. But the evil that perplexes most is not physical or 
natural ; were it only this, man might bear it with patience or 
fight against it with courage, or at least refuse to let it van- 
quish his better manhood. The evil which perplexes his reason, 
enfeebles his will, and confounds his conscience, is moral, not 
physical. Crime, vice, sin, the lusts that in their search for 
pleasure make pain, the passions, the lecheries, and the 
brutalities that possess man and desolate men, are the evils 
that create astonishment and dismay, for they do not simply 
inflict suffering, they waste what is the most god-like thing 
known to time — the soul and its happiness. The darkest of 
all the visions that can appal the imagination is that of the 
wasted manhood of the world ; the savage peoples that, on 
dark or fertile continents or beautiful sun-lit islands, have 
lived and died hardly men ; the wasted men and women, 
possibly a vaster multitude than all the savage peoples in the 
heart of Africa and in the Southern Seas, who in civilized 
lands and in Christian cities have lived to be little else than 
the causes or instruments or victims of sin. And the vision, 
if it be that of a religious imagination, will not be confined 
to time ; it will range into eternity as well. The thought of 
a man who has been base enough to seduce, or of a woman 
wretched enough to be seduced, and to avenge her seduction 
by becoming in turn a seducer ; the thought of the miseries 
and the diseases that have gone on multiplying themselves at 
an almost incalculable ratio through generations of mortals 
who are, or who ought to be, on their way to immortality, 
is, in all soberness and truth, a thought oppressive and 
painful beyond what the most solid reason can calmly bear. 
And if consolation be sought in the faith that God has no 
pleasure in the death of the wicked, but will have all men to 



AFFECTS FAITH IN GOD 97 

be saved, then out of that very comfort new perplexities come 
— Why then is His will so impotent ? Why do so many 
perish as if the Maker cared for them no more than the 
slaver cares for the slaves he carries in his hold ? That old 
mystery of evil is still a new mystery — most invincible of all the 
obstinate spectres which haunt human thought, and which will 
not be exorcized. To face it and to feel its force is to taste to 
the full that misery which Pascal said " proved the grandeur 
of man," the misery of a being who knows himself suspended 
between the abysses of nonentity and infinity ; a nothing as 
compared with the universe, a universe as contrasted with 
nothing. In the moment when that misery is keenest and the 
knowledge it brings most vivid, the words of the ancient poet 
speak to us as if they voiced the truth — the happiest thing 
would have been never to be born ; the next in happiness is 
for the living to return as quickly as possible to the place 
whence he came. 

3. Our perplexity is further increased by the fact that this 
mystery is made more mysterious by those high and sacred 
beliefs which ought to be its full and final explanation. The 
shadow that Theism so feels and fears Theism deepens and 
darkens, if, indeed, it does not altogether make the shadow. 
For if men did not believe in a good God, or if they had not 
the mood or disposition that this belief has created in humanity, 
they would not feel evil to be so insoluble a mystery. To a 
man who believes in mechanical necessity, or a fixed fate, 
every fact of life, including its evil, will remain as it is ; but 
then his conscience will not be burdened, nor his heart 
afflicted, nor his reason perplexed, as they will be if he believes 
in a free and beneficent Deity. If he imagines that the only 
sovereign in the universe is the force which holds every 
individual in its iron grasp, and necessitates every act he 
does, every thought he thinks, and every event that happens 
to him ; if he believes that man can only do what he must, 
that there is for him no pity anywhere in nature, and that 

P.C.R. 7 



98 THE PROBLEM FORMULATED 

there is no higher will to which his miseries can make their 
dumb appeal for mercy, — then he may, perhaps, regard evil, 
and with it existence, as a thing intolerable to him as an 
individual, but he will not feel compelled to pronounce 
judgment against the almighty Energy which produced both 
him and it. For where there is no choice and no morality, 
there can be no responsibility and no condemnation. But if 
a man believes that there is a powerful and righteous God, 
the Creator and Ruler of the world, he is, in the very degree 
that he is thoughtful, certain to be perplexed by the problem, 
' Why has He allowed evil to exist ? ' And he may fall a 
victim to some swift and dexterous piece of logic like this : 
- Either He could have prevented evil, but would not ; or He 
would have prevented it, but could not. If I accept the first 
alternative, then I must conclude that He is a being of 
imperfect goodness ; if I accept the second, the conclusion 
must be that He is a being of imperfect power. In either 
case He is less perfect than the God I had imagined myself 
to believe in. It is inconceivable that a perfectly good being 
could have allowed so much evil to enter, and to devastate 
the world.' 

Evil, then, when viewed in relation to existence and to 
its Author, formulates the gravest problem that a man 
who believes in a personal God can face. But whether 
he believes in Him or not, it remains a problem, acute in 
the degree that his view of life is moral. Two antithetical 
systems of thought — the one either personal and theistic or 
impersonal and pantheistic, and the other either mechanical 
and non-theistic, or conceiving creation as the work of an 
irresponsible and unconscious, though motived, cause — have 
attempted to deal seriously with this question. The one 
which it is customary to term Optimism, conceives existence 
as good in spite of its evil, or even, in certain cases, because 
of evil and through it. The other, which as its antithesis 
bears the name of Pessimism, is a philosophy which gives 



OPTIMISM AS A SOLUTION 99 

scientific expression to the view that life is hateful because 
of its attendant evils, and it may even conceive existence as 
in its essence so bad that it had better never have been. 

§ II. Optimism and Evil 

I. Optimism is, in a sense, implicit in Theism. The more 
perfect we conceive God to be, the less can we predicate evil 
of His works. As Plato said, " the deeds of the Best could 
never be or have been other than the fairest " ; and so the 
world He created was " by nature fairest and best," x " as 
far as possible a perfect whole and of perfect parts," 3 and 
could be described, in terms that become the Maker rather 
than the thing made, as the " visible God, the image of the 
Intelligible, the greatest, best, fairest, most perfect, the one 
only begotten heaven." 3 But this is nature interpreted 
through God, while the very essence of the problem is the 
interpretation of the character and ways of God through 
nature. The Stoic was even more certain than Plato that 
the creation was, in its kind and measure, as perfect as the 
Creator, but he had to maintain his belief in the face of an 
acuter moral sense and a more emphasized moral law. And 
he did this by affirming, in spite of his belief in an invincible 
fate, that there were limits to Divine power which could 
as little keep man free from moral evil as from physical 
disease ; 4 that it was as irrational to think that God could 
■connive at wickedness as that law could be guilty of crime ; 5 
that like the vulgar jest in the play, evil might be offensive, 
but, blended with the whole, it heightened the general effect ; 6 
and that it was here to train character and to be, therefore, 
finally transmuted into good. 7 But the difficulty became 

1 TimcEiis, p. 30. 2 Ibid. 32. 3 Ibid. 92. 

* Cleanthes, Hytnn, 17 ff. ; Plutarch, De Stoic. Repub., 21, 44 ; 36, I. 
' 5 Chrysippus in Plut., De Stoic. Repub., 33, 2. 

6 Marcus Aurelius, vi. 42, with the reference to Chrysippus,' Plut., 
Adv. Stoic, 14. 

7 Chrysippus in Plut., Adv. Stoic, 13 ; cf. De Stoic. Rep., 35, 3. 

L.ofC. 



ioo HOW EVIL AND SIN DIFFER 

vaster and more acute to Christian than it had been to 
Hellenic thought, for to the Christian mind God was more 
personal, more august and beneficent, while sin was a subtler 
and more terrible conception than evil, a power more de- 
structive while less destructible. For sin was conceived as a 
sort of impersonal and diabolical counterpart of God, able 
to maintain itself against Him, with a kingdom of its own, 
propagating itself and multiplying its effects by means of the 
order He had instituted, compelling His very justice to 
encourage its growth and continue its being by making the 
habit of sinning the supreme penalty of the act of sin. And 
so it was no mere ironical Nemesis, but an inexorable law 
of logic, that laid upon Augustine, the Father who was mainly 
responsible for this doctrine, the duty of vindicating the 
Providence whose ways it seemed so seriously to impugn. 
His apology followed several distinct lines, some of which 
were more germane to the notion of evil than of sin, having 
been suggested by the Greeks themselves, who had chiefly 
influenced him. Thus he argues, after Plotinus, that evil is 
nothing real, but is simply negative, a negation of being, and 
especially of God, who is the most real of all beings. Hence 
he boldly formulated the position, " in quantum est, quidquid 
est, bonum est." * There is but one God, one supreme 
essence, from whom whatever is holds its existence. As He 
is good, all His works, i.e. all created being, must be the 
same ; and so evil ought to be conceived as negative, an 
attempt to deny or abolish the works and the acts of God. 
The more being abounds, the more abundant becomes the 
good ; the more it is restricted or encroached on by the 
unreal, the more evil prevails. But Augustine knew that 
metaphysics of this sort could do little to comfort those to 
whom misery was an actual experience and sin a profound 
reality. So he argued, as the Stoics had done, that evil is 

1 De Vera Rel., 9 ; cf. De Civ. Dei, xii. 6, 7 ; De Ord., ii. 20. 



GRACE THE ANTITHESIS OF SIN ioi 

needed to enhance the beauty and the glory of the world. 1 
It is like the barbarisms which the poets love to use now and 
then as a foil to their own elegance. 2 Time is like a picture 
which needs the shadows as well as the light for its loveliest 
effects. 3 Even the eternal fires of hell, however penal to the 
sinner, tend to magnify the beauty of the whole, and exalt 
the glory of the mighty Artificer. 4 But Augustine's own 
contribution as a theologian to the solution of the problem 
was of a nobler and more satisfactory order. Over against 
the potency of sin he placed the omnipotence of God ; over 
against its power to ruin he set the grace that saved. Sin 
must be conceived through an antithesis, without which it 
never could have been. Christ was not because of Adam, but 
Adam because of Christ. Man had not been allowed to sin 
that God might be free to punish, but that He might have the 
opportunity to save. Sin entered that grace might abound. 
Through sin as occasion, though not by means of it as cause, 
God was brought nearer to man, suffered with him, endured 
sacrifice for him, and lifted him out of his evil to a higher 
glory than he could without it have attained. But it was a 
dangerous, if a daring, feat to raise evil into a means of good : 
it invited a damaging retort as to the bungling character of 
the workman who had to mar his work in order that he 
might find some way of perfecting it. As a matter of fact the 
retort was given, for the thought which so lightly touched evil 
could not bear to feel the shadow of sin. But ancient philoso- 
phy in all its classical forms had been struck with decrepitude,, 
and the criticism of the decrepit is more querulous than 
creative or illuminative. On the other hand the eclectic specu- 
lations which Augustine had so largely absorbed, made no 
notable contribution to the discussion, while in theology the 
reign of dogma was at hand, and thought moved from the 



1 De Civ. Dei, xiv. 27. * Ibid. xi. 18.. 

8 Ibid. xi. ; De Ord., i. 18. * De Civ. Dei, xii. 4. 



102 EVIL IN THE RENAISSANCE 

problems of the reason to the more pressing and practical 
questions of ecclesiastical organization. 

The mediaeval schoolmen were, on the whole (there were 
certain conspicuous exceptions), faithful to Augustine, lived 
in his intellectual world, faced his problems, and acutely 
discussed such questions as, Whether all things, in so far as 
they really exist, are good. But the hour came when the 
ancient world awoke, and mind, hearing its voice, awoke with 
it and tried to look at life in the light of the common reason ; 
but though the classical literatures helped to open the eyes, 
yet they could not silence the conscience. And so while the 
thinkers of the Renaissance learned to speak of evil, they still 
thought of sin ; but sin was less amenable to the categories 
of ancient thought than evil. The first Teutonic scholar to be 
renewed by the knowledge of antiquity, Nicholas of Cusa, 
is also here the finest exponent of the new mind. While 
Greece awoke in him the feeling for nature, it did not take 
from him his inherited passion for God ; rather, as he himself 
tells us, it begot in him the ambition of uniting the two in a 
single conception. 1 God is superessential, and can be ex- 
pressed in no category. 3 He is the eternal Unity which is 
prior to all variety, and the ground of all change. 3 He is 
the synthesis of all being, all is in Him, and He is in all. 4 
Nature is an organism whose soul is God, 5 and whose organs 
are the infinite multitude of persons who live and move and 
exist in Him. The world is nothing but the apparition of 
the invisible God ; God is but the invisibility of all visible 
existences. 6 Since the two are so related, each must be as 
the other is ; disharmony can neither mar its life nor disturb 
His ; He is the absolutely perfect Being, and it is the most 
perfect world possible. 7 The philosophical successor of 

1 De docta Ignor., iii. ad fin. 2 Ibid. ii. 8. 

8 Ibid. ii. 5. 4 Ibid. iii. 4. 

5 Ibid. ii. 13. Nicholas' phrase is mens mundi ; cf. De Poss., 175. 

e De docta Ignor., A. 11 ; cf. De Conjecluris, ii. 10. 

7 De docta Ignor., ii. 4 ; De ludo Globi, i. 154. 



AND IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY 103 

Nicholas was Giordano Bruno, who developed the notion of 
God as the Unity of all difference into an explicit and 
conscious Pantheism. 

2. But our concern is not with the logic that made men 
pantheists ; it is with the modes in which the ideas of God 
and evil affected each other in minds that had ceased to 
believe in Christian theology while living face to face with 
the Christian religion. Now the remarkable thing is that just 
as thought became less Christian, the problem of evil grew 
at once more mysterious and more imperative. Christianity 
is the only religion that has dared to articulate a theology 
from the premiss not simply of God's sole sovereignty, but of 
His direct responsibility for man ; and has had at the same 
time the courage to conceive man as capable of alienating 
himself from God and of making evil his deity. For 
centuries the Christian notion of sin had held man in its 
burning hands, magnifying his power, but darkening his state 
and his destiny ; for many centuries he had believed in a God 
infinitely good and gracious, the Maker of a race that had 
chosen to become bad, the Redeemer of the race from the 
evil its own choice had made. These things stood indis- 
solubly together : man's act, or the sin that alienated ; God's 
action, or the grace that saved. But the denial of the 
Christian redemption left men standing face to face with two 
ideas they could neither deny nor relate and reconcile, God 
and evil. This antithesis stood at its sharpest in Deism, 
which loved to describe itself as a system of natural religion, 
but which we may describe as an attempt to conceive God 
in the manner of the Christian religion without any of the 
experiences, beliefs, and associations that had made it possible 
so to conceive Him. God was good, and evil was the grimmest 
of all realities. He had made the world, and had allowed 
sin to enter it, yet He would not touch the world He had 
made or do anything to save it from the evil He had allowed. 
Hence came a stupendous problem, which Deism did its best 



104 LEIBNITZ : KINDS OF EVIL 

not to see ; and the easiest way not to see it was to say, and 
keep on saying, " Everything which exists is according to 
a good order, and for the best." The " perfect Theist " 
was defined to be the man who " believed that everything is 
governed, ordered, or regulated for the best by a designing 
principle or mind, necessarily good and permanent." 1 This 
is the optimism of the eighteenth century, and it has two 
classical representatives — Leibnitz and Pope. It is hardly 
fair, indeed, to bracket two such men together, for Leibnitz 
was the most original speculative intellect of his day, an 
orthodox Protestant, while a rational theist ; but Pope was, 
while a Catholic, a very conventional and derivative deist, who 
proudly acknowledged that the views unfolded in his rhymed 
argumentation were borrowed. 

(i.) Leibnitz expressed his view, philosophically, in his The'o- 
dice'e, 2 and its formula has passed into general literature — 
"This is the best of, all possible worlds." He emphasized the 
word "possible." Nature did not exist by necessity ; it might 
or it might not have been, and it was because God had so 
willed. A better world might be imagined, but no better 
could have been made. Leibnitz's idea had a positive and a 
negative basis ; the positive was the goodness and wisdom of 
God. Since He was what He was, He could be satisfied with 
nothing less than the best attainable. The negative basis 
may be termed the limitations which thought must set to 
the Divine power. God could accomplish only the possible, 
and a moral world without evil was beyond the resources 
even of Omnipotence. The only perfect being was the 
Infinite, but the Infinite could not be made ; the created must 
be limited, and where limitation is, there evil, in one form or 
another, must be. Leibnitz distinguished evil as of three classes 
— metaphysical, physical, and ethical. 3 (a) The metaphysical 

1 Shaftesbury, Characteristics, vol. ii. pp. 4, 5. 

2 Essais de Theodicee sur la Bontd de Dieu, la Liberte de Vhomme et 
POrigine du Mai, 17 10. 3 Ibid. p. 85, § 21. 



THE BEST POSSIBLE WORLD 105 

evil was primary ; it was limitation of being, it belonged to 
everything less than God. Whatever had its being in time, 
whatever had less than infinite being, suffered from meta- 
physical evil ; i.e. was forbidden by the very terms of its 
existence to possess within itself the beatitude, the absolute 
knowledge, the power, experience, and benevolence of the 
Deity. (/3) Physical evil was due to metaphysical ; wherever 
an essentially limited being existed there was not only the 
capability but the necessity of suffering in some form, either 
privative, because the limited being was without the beatitude 
of the divine ; or positive, from the operation upon the finite 
or limited of the infinite multitude of causes that make 
up the created universe. (7) Ethical evil was the free and 
voluntary disobedience of a moral being. The ability to 
sin, nay, the certainty of sinning, was rooted in the original 
or metaphysical imperfection of the creature. 1 Where there 
was limitation of knowledge and experience there could not 
but be subjection to an outer and regulative or higher Will. 
But since moral obedience could not be necessitated, moral 
disobedience was certain ; for inexperience could not but be 
unstable, and where experiment was needed failure might 
be the surest way to success. 

These three kinds of evil so co-existed in the very idea 
of a moral universe that one could not possibly be framed 
so as to exclude them. This was obvious to the Divine 
Intelligence. An infinite multitude of possible worlds lay 
before the vision of God. Evil was involved in every one 
which He conceived as possible, but out of all this infinitude of 
possibilities He selected for realization the best possible. As 
absolutely good and wise, He could select no other. And this 
world He selected, not because of its evil, but in spite of its 
evil, resolved to overrule the evil, which was inseparable from 
created being, to its greater good and His own greater glory. 

1 Ibid. p. 199, § 156. 



106 POPE'S ESSAY ON MAN 

The only alternatives, therefore, which Leibnitz allowed were 

not between a more and a less imperfect world, but between 

the best possible and no world at all. If there was to be no 

evil, there must be no creation ; if God chose to create, He 

had no choice but to create the metaphysically imperfect, i.e. 

those capable of suffering and of doing evil. And here he 

introduced two important modifying ideas : (a) Creation was 

not a completed event, but a continuous process ; 1 if God 

ceased to act, nature and man would cease to be ; and He 

acts freely, ever willing and working the creature's good. And 

(/3) this good is progressive ; as man improves evil decays, 

the improvement being the work of God, the deterioration, 

or delay in realizing the good, the work of man. God is 

related to the world of actual forces as the stream to the boat 

which floats upon it. If the progress of the boat is hindered, 

it is not by the stream, but by obstacles on the banks or in 

its course. " And God is as little the cause of evil as the 

current of the river is the cause which retards the movement 

\_of the boat." 2 He so guides and controls the world, which 

His creative action ever renews, that even from its evil we 

shall yet reap a large harvest of good. 

(ii.) Pope's view was expressed in his " Essay on Man," which 

crudely, though poetically, summarized the deistic optimism 

that had in Bolingbroke its elegant and prolix exponent. 

His optimism had its formula in the familiar words — 

"Whatever is, is right," 

and it had, in effect, three principles. First, the sovereign 

will was cosmical rather than ethical ; its absolute might 

made all its deeds and decrees right. Hence he did not so 

much explain how moral evil came to be as deny that it was. 

" If plagues or earthquakes break not heaven's design, 
Why then a Borgia or a Cataline?" 

The Creator 

" Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind." 

1 Theodicee, pp. 375-378, §§ 382-385. 2 Ibid. p. 91, § 30. 



POVERTY OF DEISTIC OPTIMISM 107 

And it was as little natural to expect 

"Eternal springs and cloudless skies, 
As men for ever tenip'rate, calm, and wise." 

He so works out the parallel between nature and man, 
between physical events and moral characters and acts, that 
the moral becomes even as the physical ; and his right is too 
much the product of might to be the equivalent of Augus- 
tine's " good " or Leibnitz's " best possible." Hence, secondly, 
he is as unjust to suffering as to sin, and sacrifices without 
scruple the individual to the universal. The principle that 
" partial evil is universal good " is construed to mean that 
the person who suffers ought to be content to bear the 
evil he suffers from because it serves great universal ends. 
He should not rebuke nature for enforcing her laws, even 
though it be at his expense, for only by such enforcement 
can harmony be secured. And all the evil that disturbed 
and distressed us was harmony not understood. It was, as 
it were, the discord in the universal symphony which made 
its music more majestic and more complete. 

" Respecting man, whatever wrong we call, 
May, must be right, as relative to all." 

And, thirdly, there was the principle that evil ought not to 
be judged simply from this life, but also from man's relation 
to the future, which had to be invoked if the present was to 
be comprehended. The balance of our judgment needed, in 
order to its perfect equilibrium, to have time counter-weighted 
with eternity. And so we were bidden to 

" Hope humbly, and with trembling pinions soar." 

We might not know the future, but hope could make its 
blessings a present experience. 

" Hope springs eternal in the human breast ; 
Man never is, but always to be blessed." 

3. We may frankly confess that Pope's optimism seems to us 
of the shallowest. It was but the smug content of the well- 



io8 VOLTAIRE'S UNCONSCIOUS THEODICY 

to-do, praising in polished metres the Providence which had 
been wise enough to make him comfortable. He rejoices to 
find his happiness set off by the abounding misery. The 
God he so often names does not live ; He is a mere abstract 
term adjusted to suit now the premiss, now the conclusion of 
a rhymed syllogism. What is true of English Deism as a 
whole, is true of this its most brilliant production : it " was 
only a particular way of repudiating Christianity. There was 
as little of God in it as could well be." l Candide is a satire 
on optimism ; but though it was a piece of insolent impiety, 
I would rather have Voltaire's attitude to this question than 
Pope's. For he showed that he could be moved by suffering, 
and could feel as intensely about the calamities man endured 
from the forces of nature as about the injustice he experi- 
enced at the hands of man. The earthquake of Lisbon stirs 
him almost as much as the tragedy of Calas, and one respects 
him the more for the passion he shows, for the indignation 
with which he rejects the idea that eternal law can justify the 
massacre of the innocents. Was Lisbon more wicked than 
London or Paris ? Yet 

Lisbonne est abimee, et l'on danse a Paris. 

In this moral fury there was an unconscious Theodicy ; if 
the Sovereign of the universe be moral, it would be infinitely 
more agreeable to Him than the epigrammatical eulogies of 
a poet more intent on refining his numbers than touching the 
heart of things. The optimism which has not gravely faced 
the immensity and the intensity of the world's misery has no 
claim to be heard. And Pope's claims are the fewer that he 
so played with the greatest of human hopes and the deepest 
of human facts ; for if time cannot be justified without 
eternity, then, as time is all that is known to our experience, 
the result is a serious impeachment of the divine rectitude. 
We may be quite unable to judge a complete work until the 

1 Mr. John Morley, Voltaire, p. 95. 



EVIL AND THE LAW OF EVOLUTION 109 

work be completed, yet it is mischievous logic which seeks 
to make the universe we know a thing incapable of vindica- 
tion without the help of a universe we do not know. If 
Butler's plea — that most of the difficulties of faith are due to 
a system imperfectly understood, were valid, then, it might 
fairly be argued, so would its converse be, viz., that a system 
which stood embodied in our own experience could not be 
justified by a system which was so far beyond it as to have 
no real being for it. And what could two such opposites do 
save neutralize each other ? Time, therefore, ought to have 
within itself its own apology and ought not to require to 
depend for justification on an appeal from itself to eternity. 
It may be of more interest to remark that Pope's plea for 
" partial evil " as " universal good " has almost an equivalent 
in the speculative physicism of to-day. It is wonderful how 
our intellectual and moral thought has been so penetrated by 
the doctrine of the struggle for existence and the survival of 
the fittest that we almost feel as if it were an eternal law, 
even though the fittest be so often the strongest rather than 
the wisest or the best. But in this law of survival there 
are two sides — one affecting the victor, another affecting the 
vanquished. It may be an excellent thing to the survivor to 
survive, but this does not sweeten the lot of the victim who 
has had to succumb. And the vanquished, as much as the 
victor, belongs to the whole of life ; he is as integral a part 
of the universe, and has, therefore, such rights as the fact of 
being may carry with it. And it is the whole of being that 
needs to be vindicated. It is possible to purchase the con- 
tinuance of the elect few at too high a price ; and it is so 
purchased when it means the sacrifice of the infinite multitude 
of the rejected, each unit of which had all the possibilities 
of happiness or misery, of sensitiveness to suffering and sus- 
ceptibility to joy which the survivor himself possessed. And 
if we are to vindicate the law or order of the universe, it must 
not simply be in the eye and judgment of him who has 



no PANTHEISTIC OPTIMISM 

survived — the fact of his own survival is to him justification 
enough — but in the eye of him who has been vanquished. It 
is the sufferer who needs to be consoled. It is not the man 
who never had a son who needs to be comforted when a 
mother mourns beside the bier of her dead boy. We cannot, 
therefore, exclude from consideration the weak who suffer,, 
and only magnify the strong who survive. If there be partial 
evil, we are not to say that it is made righteous by the 
existence of universal good, which is the very point in dis-- 
pute ; we must tell those to whom partial evil has been 
the whole of life what their evil means, why their evil is,, 
and how it stands related to Him who, as the Author of their 
being, has sent them where they have had to suffer so severely. 
4. With what many would regard as pantheistic optimism' 
we do not need to concern ourselves. It has two distinct 
types — -one with a specially ethical temper, represented by 
Spinoza ; another with a more intellectual or logical mind,, 
represented by Hegel. Neither of their systems is indeed 
properly pantheistic ; both may better be described as simply 
speculative or philosophical theisms. Spinoza held evil to be 
a thing natural ; vice to be something not to be condemned, 
but to be explained. All that is he conceived as a mode of 
the infinite Being or Substance, and evil as a necessary element 
in the infinite modes which, as modifications of the Infinite 
or God, were inseparable from Him. Evil was necessary 
because it was privative, imperfection being mere negation of 
being, therefore proper to every mode in the degree of its 
remoteness from the whole of being. He thus affirmed that 
he could not concede sin and evil to be anything positive, 
still less could anything be or become contrary to the will 
of God. 1 The optimism of Spinoza was thus due to his 
inability to recognize vice as voluntary, wrong as optional ; 
all was part of a necessary system, and justified by its neces- 
sity. The Hegelian view was formulated in the principle 
1 Ep. xix., Opera, ii. p. 66 (Van Vloten et Land). 



TRANSITION TO PESSIMISM in 

that the actual was the rational. Find a reason for what is, 
and what is will be found to be reasonable. Hegel's was the 
optimism of a universal logic which attempted to represent 
the whole of time as a dialectical movement, and conceived 
life under the categories of thought ; and which, therefore, by 
its constant need of theses and antitheses and syntheses, 
could find no place for that which ought not to have been. 
This, of course, is a vague and general statement as to Hegel's 
position, truer in the abstract than in the concrete. It is 
hard, nay impossible, in any rational philosophy to find a 
place or a reason for an irrational thing, which evil essentially 
is. While no man ever argued more cogently than Hegel 
to the negative character of evil, no man ever stated more 
emphatically its incompatibility in the concrete with the 
moral ideal. Evil, speculatively construed, was " a negative 
which, though it would fain assert itself, has no real persist- 
ence, and is, in fact, only the absolute sham existence of 
negativity in itself" {der absolute Schein der Negativatat 
in sick)} But moral evil could not be otherwise conceived 
and described than as the incongruity (Unangemessenheit) 
of what is with what ought to be. 2 

§ III. Pessimism Ancient and Modern 

I. From Optimism in its several types Pessimism stands 
distinguished thus : Evil is not an incident capable of an 
explanation which justifies either God as the Author of 
existence, or existence as the handiwork of God ; but it is, 
as it were, the whole of being ; it composes and constitutes 
the whole picture, occupies the eye and prospect of the 
soul, which cannot see life save through evil. Pessimism thus 
makes evil as of the very essence of being, and so conceives 
the universe that it does not seek the preservation of being by 
the expulsion of evil, but rather the expulsion of evil by the 

1 Encyclopddie, vol. i. p. 73 ; Wallace's Logic oj Hegel, p. 71. 

2 Encyclopddie, vol. iii. p. 364 ; Wallace's Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, p. 94. 



H2 CAUSES OF PESSIMISM 

abolition of existence. This means that it cannot regard the 
actual as the rational, but as the irrational ; or the good as 
universal and evil as partial, but, on the contrary, evil is 
universal, and there is no good. It is so far from conceiving 
this as the best of all possible worlds that it describes it as 
so bad that no-world would have been better. Pessimism 
knows no creator whom it can hold responsible for evil, nor 
any sovereign through whose benevolence or wisdom it can 
be removed. Hence it is a philosophy which aims not only 
at explaining how existence happened to arise, but how it 
may most surely and utterly cease to be. 

But perhaps we shall make its real meaning more intelligible 
if, instead of confining ourselves to the exposition of a single 
term, we attempt to present it in certain of its historical 
forms, and in relation to the mood or temper which they 
express. It is peculiar neither to Western thought nor to our 
own century. It did not owe its being to Schopenhauer nor 
its vogue to Von Hartmann ; it expresses a temper which 
is too near the surface, and too ready to express itself in 
poignant speech to have been so late of birth. It has arisen 
in different countries and at different times, though always 
under similar conditions ; and it implies the operation of 
similar causes, general and personal. We find it emerging 
wherever great wealth, luxury, and refinement co-exist with 
want, famine, and the savage mood which these beget in 
civilized men. It belongs to times when the forces that 
work for evil overpower the individual will, and undertake to 
command masses of men. And it springs from the feeling, 
whether in a few or in many minds, which may be described 
as an attitude either of despondency, or of despair, or the con- 
tempt of life. It is not a normal or a healthy feeling. The 
normal healthy man does not ask, "Is life worth living?" 
He lives his life, or he may try to live it, worthily, and to fill 
it with such worth as he himself possesses. It is the man 
who despairs of life who feels it a burden, doubts whether it 



INCONGENIAL TO GREEK MIND 113 

be worth his while to go through with it, and concludes that 
if it be worth the trouble to do so, it is only in order that 
he may benefit man by helping him to bring his existence 
to a final and more utter end. 

2. Pessimism was not a mood very congenial to the 
classical mind, especially as it expressed itself in Hellenic 
philosophy. The nearest approach to it we can find is in 
Cynicism, but Cynicism was in many respects the converse of 
Pessimism. It was marked not so much by a contempt for 
life in the abstract as a contempt for men who did not live 
worthily. It believed that life was good, and that it became 
bad only when its accidents were taken for its essence. It 
believed in a law that bound all men to be virtuous ; and it 
despised those who claimed to be men of worth, yet did not 
observe or obey the law they claimed to embody. It may 
be described as a cruder, a more primitive, and, in a sense, 
a more savage Stoicism. Greek Stoicism and, in an even 
higher degree, Roman was positive, an attempt to realize the 
idea of manhood implanted in the nature of man ; but 
Cynicism was negative, a criticism of the lives- of men in the 
light of the ideal. Yet the Cynic was not simply a critic ; on 
the contrary, his criticism rested on a doctrine of human 
nature as ethical as the Stoic, though he had not worked out 
as genial a method of perfecting character. In his scorn of 
those who made the accessories into the essence of life, he 
tended to dispense with even what was good in these, and 
to despise refinement as well as the luxuries in which it 
imagined it seemly to be clothed, in order that the nakedness 
of the natural man might be the better hidden. He made 
his protest against the conventional habits which suggested 
the shameful and stimulated the sordid they were professedly 
used to conceal, by attempting to live as a barbarian. Thus 
the element of Pessimism in his thought was due to the 
clearness with which he saw the evil in existing tendencies, 
societies, characters, and persons ; but so far was he from 

P.C.R. 8 



ii4 IN MEDIAEVAL RELIGION 

identifying the shams which he hated with the whole of 
being which he loved, that he conceived evil as a contra- 
diction of that law of right and duty or virtue which was the 
highest of all laws, written in the heart and soul of man 
for realization in his conduct and in society. 

Again, mediaeval Asceticism had certain principles and 
features in common with Pessimism. It thought the world 
wrong, too unclean to be a fit home for a holy man ; therefore 
a place to be forsaken of him who would save his own soul. 
The existing order of society was conceived to be evil, and 
it was thought better that the good man should take himself 
out of that order than endanger his own soul by remaining 
within it. On its personal side it was a doctrine of salvation, 
but on its social side it was a doctrine of annihilation, so far 
at least as its attitude signified that the world was so bad 
that the pious man could neither desire its continuance, nor 
do anything to promote it. It was in this latter aspect that 
it agreed with Pessimism, for it conceived secular society as 
so under the power of evil that the happiest thing for it 
was to pass away and perish. But here the similarity ended, 
for Asceticism cultivated the hope that One who was more 
potent than the world might be persuaded, through . the 
penance and self-denial it practized, to save the poor soul of 
man, and to replace the dissolved secular society by the new 
and higher spiritual order called the Church. 

3. These classical and catholic tendencies are typical of the 
pessimistic mood which is never very remote from any of us. 
The first impulse of the man angry at the emptinesses and 
unrealities of human life, is to rage at it as all vanity and 
vexation of spirit. And the quick overmastering passion of 
the man who has just been seized and possessed by belief in 
the reality of spiritual and eternal things, is to forsake a 
world which is absorbed in the enjoyment of things temporal, 
and to retire to a solitude where he may cultivate his fears 
and watch from a distance sure-footed fate overtake those 



AND IN MODERN POETRY 115 

who are too blind to see its approach or too sodden to care 
for it. But common tendencies have many forms besides the 
ethical and the religious ; and some of these the modern 
pessimistic mood has readily assumed. In the first decades 
of our century it took an imaginative and emotional or 
sentimental shape, and had, in the poetry of revolt, extra- 
ordinary vogue. Goethe, in his earlier period, passed through 
it, but he cultivated contempt of life only that he might the 
more enjoy it. He loved the bitter because it helped to 
flavour the sweet. With Byron there is more of the genuine 
pessimistic spirit — the feeling that made him love to think 
of himself as a kind of martyr, sacrificed by a too conven- 
tional society because of his own too conventional vices. He 
had a vanity that only sang the more that it sat in the cold 
shadow of criticism, though the song into which it broke was 
one of vehement satire and vicious denial. He had the 
sense of being an outcast from his country and his kind. 

"With pleasure drugg'd, he almost longed for woe, 
And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below." 

But even in him it was a mood, a temper, now petulant, 
now imaginative, expressing personal feeling rather than 
reasoned conviction. He had a pessimistic hatred of life, 
not unmingled, as far as his vanity allowed it, with contempt 
of himself ; and this, of course, was only the obverse of his 
dislike to the society which would not indulge him with 
the praise his temper imperiously claimed. How much it 
was mood and how little it was reasoned belief may be seen 
from its vivid contrast to the jubilant imaginative idealism of 
Shelley, who so feels the joy of existence that he carries as 
it were, his own skylark singing within his breast, making 
him feel as if the only true philosophy of life was a kind of 
divine intermingling of being with love and of love with 
being. But we must distinguish the imaginative temper, 
which is strictly personal, from the philosophical, which is 
intellectual and universal ; and Pessimism is not the poetic 



n6 PESSIMISM IN POLITICS 

expression of a mood, but the dialectical explication of an 
idea which seeks to cover and comprehend the whole of life. 
The Pessimism in politics which is known to us as Anarchy 
or Nihilism is as significant of the close of the nineteenth 
century as the poetry of revolt was of its opening. Nihilism 
does not, like Socialism, express the belief that there is an 
ideal order which not only may be, but which ought to be, 
realized ; on the contrary, it expresses, in the true pessimistic 
vein, the precisely opposite belief — that the social system is 
so bad that it had better cease to be, i.e. that society should 
be resolved into its primitive elements. Socialism may be 
described as Utopian, i.e. it is a form of ideal Optimism, the 
belief that though the best of all possible societies has not 
yet existed, it may be made to exist ; and indeed the whole 
effort of human society and the sole function of legislation is 
to turn as quickly and as painlessly as may be practicable 
this possible best into a beneficent reality. But Nihilism 
springs from the despair of beneficent change, and simply 
proposes the total abolition of things as they are without any 
scheme for their amelioration or any suggestion of a better 
or a worthier order. It is instructive to note the conditions 
under which Nihilism springs up. It is a native of countries 
where absolute authority reigns, which are governed by a 
despotism that will not allow free speech, or the distribution 
of the literature that may educate and enlighten the mind, or 
the expression of the opinion that, by telling of social dis- 
content, reveals its causes and shows how it may be changed 
into contentment. We may take it as a certain law of 
history and society that where mind feels unable to modify 
the system under which it lives, it will seek good by the 
dissolution of the order which dooms it to impotence. The 
system that has no room for reason, reason can neither 
respect nor spare. On the other hand, in the political con- 
ditions where speech is free, where combination is allowed 
and where the main factors of amelioration are in the hands 



NIHILISM AND SOCIALISM CONTRASTED 117 

of those who feel the hardships of life, the tendency will 
be to seek help from constructive ideas in social politics. 
Hence in free countries dissatisfaction with an existing order 
becomes either, if political, the dream of a broader freedom ; 
or, if economical, the dream of a more ideal society, where 
the units are to be equal in wealth and in well-being. But 
Nihilism expresses the awful impotence of the individual in 
the face of an absolute power ; while Socialism implies the 
competence of those who have power to change the existing 
system from one that works to the benefit of a class or 
classes into one that works for the equal benefit of the whole. 
The significance of Nihilism as Pessimism in politics for our 
present discussion is that it illustrates the conditions which 
produce the pessimistic mood, and make inevitable the pessi- 
mistic idea. Men may well think that where being cannot 
be improved, even when it works disastrously, it is better 
that it should be destroyed than continue to destroy. 

§ IV. Eastern and Western Pessimism 

I. But poetry and politics are here only incidental and 
illustrative ; the theme that concerns us is philosophical 
Pessimism. It may be described as the sense of evil turned 
into a theory of being and formulated in a law for the 
regulation and conduct of life. Speaking in the most general 
terms, we may say that, both as a mood and as a philosophy, 
it is more native to the East than to the West. In the East 
it has had its completest expression not exactly in popular 
Buddhism, which is too ethical, too eclectic, and too wishful to 
help where it pities to be properly described as pessimistic ; 
but in philosophical Buddhism, the speculative theory which 
may have been at the root of the Master's mind and cer- 
tainly was in the mind of his disciples. It has characteristic 
analogues in certain types of Hindu philosophy, in the 
fatalism of Islam, and in at least one of the great sects of 
China. If this Pessimism is to be understood in its basis 



n8 THE PESSIMISM OF INDIA 

and in its essence, it ought to be studied in and through the 
conditions which created what we have termed its most 
perfect expression — the Philosophy of Buddhism. 
• Let us distinctly conceive the conditions under which the 
system arose. It stood in a two-fold antithesis to the 
speculative tendencies it found in India, even though it was 
a dialectical evolution from them. The philosophy that made 
it was that of the ascetic communities, or the forest schools, 
where men cultivated the meditation by which they hoped to 
escape from the conditions of their mortal being. In these 
schools there was a kind of aristocracy both of blood and of 
idea. The scholars sprang from the castes of the twice born, 
i.e. they were men of Aryan descent ; and the ideas on which 
they meditated had been born of the Aryan mind, and were 
rooted in its experience and history. They conceived man 
as an emanation from the great abstract Being whom they 
had evolved from their old and simple theistic beliefs. This 
being was not personal and masculine, but abstract and 
neuter, a Substance or Essence rather than a God. They 
Called him now Brahma, now Atman or Paramatman, Soul 
or Supreme Soul, now the One or the That, which breathed 
breathless, 1 within whom had somehow arisen a sort of dim 
desire to realize himself, whence had come creation and all 
the souls of men. These souls were like so many atoms 
singly and collectively imperishable, each capable of conver- 
sion, but incapable of destruction ; all issued from Brahma, all 
were destined to absorption in Brahma ; but from the moment 
of origin to the moment of absorption — points infinitely re- 
mote from each other — there ceaselessly revolved the wheel 
of existence, and they with it. And this wheel, to which all 
being was bound and with which all moved, carried the indi- 
vidualized soul, or the separated atom, round and round in 
cycles and epicycles of incalculable change till the supreme 
moment arrived when he could escape from it back into the 
1 Rig Veda, bk. x. 129. 



BUDDHA'S ENVIRONMENT 119 

undifferentiated and undistributed Brahma. In one age he 
might be born a man, in another a wild beast ravening in the 
forest ; in his human cycle he might move downward from 
king to beggar, or upward from low-born fool and sinner to 
high-born sage and saint, or he might fall from the seraphic 
to the demoniac state ; in one existence he might live like a 
god, in another he might be humiliated to the lowest ranks of 
the brute creation. But rest, the end he was bound ever to 
seek and to crave, was of all things the hardest to attain ; 
and here the cruel and inexorable partiality of the conditions 
which regulated these changes appeared. They were made 
to depend on acts done in states of existence prior to the 
one in which the man for the time found himself — states of 
which he had no recollection, and acts whose consequences 
he bore, but whose performance lay outside his consciousness. 
These acts were the thongs which bound him to the wheel of 
existence as it ceaselessly revolved, now lifting him to the 
summit, now plunging him to the depths, but never allowing 
him to escape from the life which was destiny. The theory 
was, therefore, not simply metaphysical or philosophical, but 
also intensely practical because applied, in the most ghastly 
way, to character and conduct. It had been worked into a 
social order, sanctioned by a religious system, guarded by 
ceremonies and sacerdotal sanctions of the most ubiquitous 
and imperious kind. The misuse of ritual, offences against 
caste, neglect of observances belonging to the ceremonial of 
religion, violation of the customs, order, or organization of 
society, might have effects on souls living here that could 
not be exhausted by ages of downward, upward, or dubious 
change. And this social system was administered by men 
who were neighbours, but could not be relations ; men who 
as priests held the approaches to God, and in right of their 
divine descent regulated human affairs with a higher authority 
than belonged to kings. And as Buddha stood face to face 
with this system of eternal change, conditioned in its opera- 



120 IF EXISTENCE BE SORROW 

tion, in its good or ill, by external acts, he said : " What is 
life on these terms? Can it be called a good? Is it not 
rather a misery? And can there be any benevolence in 
continuing an existence which must be either in idea or 
experience miserable ? The existence which possesses such 
eternal possibilities of sorrow, nay, such dreadful temporal cer- 
tainties, cannot be good ; its very essence is evil ; instability 
marks it ; birth introduces to a world of suffering ; death 
is departure to a world of greater suffering, if not in actual 
experience at least in possible event. And where the 
possibilities of evil are in number and in duration so nearly 
infinite, can existence be other than an agony to him who 
contemplates it with a serious and sober eye ? " 

Existence, then, seemed to Buddha to be in its very essence 
sorrow ; sorrow for misery that either had been, or was being, 
or was to be, endured, whether by ourselves or by others or 
by all combined, "the whole creation which groaned and 
travailed in pain together. Now sorrow is not good, but 
where it is inseparable from being the only possible escape 
from sorrow is escape from existence. But how can we 
escape it ? Buddha's answer sprang out of the philosophy 
which he had learned in the ascetic communities, but its 
conclusion, the negation in which it ended, was due to the 
negation from which he started, the denial of Brahma and 
of the soul with which he was identified. With the Hindu 
schools, Buddha said : " If we live to-day, it is because we 
have in some past existence accumulated the merit that calls 
for reward, or the demerit that cries for punishment. Merit 
is only a less evil than demerit, for it maintains in being, and 
by means of this continuance perpetuates the eternal possi- 
bility of some downward change through some act of conscious 
or unconscious sin." And then he added : " in order to escape 
from being we must escape equally from merit and demerit; 
but to do this we cannot live among men, where we must do 
the things which entitle to penalty or reward. We must 



THE ONLY MENDING IS ENDING 121 

retire from the world and cultivate the suppression of the 
very desire to live, the surrender of the capability to act, the 
quenching of the thirst that by goading us into action binds 
by merit or demerit to the wheel of life. When we have 
ceased to desire, we shall cease to will, cease to act, to acquire, 
or to lose merit. The law that maintains being and enforces 
change will then cease to operate, and released from the ever 
revolving wheel, we shall attain Nirvana and return no more." 

Buddha's theory was pessimistic, for it conceived being as 
sorrow, and the discipline he enforced was a method for the 
cessation of personal existence ; but it was a pessimism which 
could be so justified and construed as to be translated into 
its contrary. On the principles which he assumed, and under 
the conditions in which he lived, it may almost be termed an 
Optimism. For if personal being is an endless cycle of change, 
now upward, now downward, conditioned on acts seldom 
ethical and still more seldom evitable, then certainly the 
noblest conception we can form of it is that it is bad, and the 
most benevolent thing we can propose to do with it is to 
abolish it. If to be is to suffer, if to continue in being is 
to be confronted with the eternal possibility of ever darker 
and deeper suffering, then being is a thing better ended than 
mended. Buddhism measured by the purpose of Buddha, 
and the principles which were the assumed basis of all his 
thought and of the thinking of all India in his day, is only 
formally pessimistic, in spirit and design it is an Optimism. 

2. If now we turn from India and Buddha to Europe and 
Western Pessimism, we shall see what material differences lie 
within their formal agreements. 

Pessimism first received conscious philosophical expression 
in the West at the hands of Schopenhauer, who was born in 
1788 and died in i860. I have no intention to enter into 
any details of biographical criticism, though no philosophy 
owes more to its author's peculiar psychology or more faith- 
fully reflects the collision of the forces which now lifted him 



122 PESSIMISM— EASTERN AND WESTERN 

to heaven and now cast him into the dust. His life was 
rather mean and sordid than noble, the life of a man who 
never knew how to live in harmony and peace either with 
himself or with men, who quarrelled, spitefully, now with his 
mother, now with his sister, now with his publisher, now with 
his landlady, now with the obscurest and least reputable of 
the neighbours about him, and quarrelled ever in the meanest 
and most implacable way. It is too undignified a life to be 
alluded to further than to say that in judging a system we 
must ever remember its author's personal equation, reckon 
with his character, his intellectual and ethical qualities. He 
had moods when he reverently studied " Plato the divine and 
the marvellous Kant," and moods when his hatred of Hegel 
broke into virulent and scurrilous speech. He had a temper 
that now gloried in depicting " the utter despicability " of 
mankind in general and great men in particular, and now so 
pitied man that he could not admire the beauty of nature 
for thinking of the human suffering hidden within it. 

Now, though this peculiar temper and mood may not ex- 
plain his philosophical principles, yet they help to explain the 
use to which he turned them, the spirit he breathed into them,, 
and the form they assumed in his hands. So far as his system 
owes its being to external causes it was the result of two 
tendencies — one specifically German, the other distinctively 
Oriental. The German tendency supplied his thought with 
its philosophic groundwork, but the Oriental, though it came 
from an East ill understood, gave the impulse that built 
into a system of Pessimism the principles he had inherited. 
He had philosophical antecedents in Kant and in Fichte ; 
but the impetus which determined the direction he took was 
given, though mediately, by Buddha. His thought stood 
rooted not so much in the transcendental as in the practical 
dialectic of Kant ; or rather, to be more accurate, the trans- 
cendental dialectic gave him his critical idea, but the practical 
suggested, if it did not already contain, his positive doctrine. 



SCHOPENHAUER AND BUDDHA 123 

He learned from Kant's speculative system to affirm the 
subjectivity and limitations of knowledge ; to argue that the 
realities of science and vulgar experience are only appear- 
ances, mere ideas of the mind, and that if we are to find 
reality we must seek it in man rather than in nature. And 
in the search for reality Kant was again his guide, though it 
was the Kant that Fichte had made known rather than the 
Kant of Schelling and Hegel. Fichte started from the ethical 
philosophy, especially the idea of the categorical imperative 
and the freedom that was necessary to it. In his hands the 
Ego became the creative idea ; it not only organized and 
constituted, but it made the world. The categorical impera- 
tive and the Will that obeyed it represented the ultimate 
reality, the law that fulfilled itself in the Ego, and became 
through its acts and by its means the divine force in history 
and religion, the true moral order of the universe. And it 
is significant, as indicating an unsuspected unity in the two 
main sources of Schopenhauer's system, that Fichte's idea of 
moral order as deity had a curious kinship with Buddha's 
karma, which represented the inexorable concatenation of 
act and result, merit and reward, demerit and penalty. Will 
thus, as the Ego in action, became the chief factor of life, 
its qualities, and the order within which it was lived ; in 
other words, it was the Providence that governed the lives 
of men. Schopenhauer took this idea, and made Will the 
supreme reality and the cause of existence ; by it being was 
realized. The idea is the object which exists for a subject, 
things as perceived, but the force which objectifies is the 
Will, which may be described as causation interpreted in the 
terms of psychology or volition rather than of physics or 
energy. It is more a motived than a mechanical force ; it is 
one and universal, lies outside time and space, yet is ever 
objectifying itself in the things that arise therein. As indi- 
viduated in man, it is noumenal, and is inseparable from the 
person, distributed through the whole organism, acts in it 



124 POINTS WHEREIN THEY AGREED 

and through it ; the organism is the incorporated Will. It 
is therefore because of this Will that we live, and willing is 
living ; we create life by willing to live. This function of the 
Will, while it grew out of Kant as interpreted by Fichte, was 
the correlative of Buddha's Upadana, or the grasping at exist- 
ence, which is the cause of continued being. The Will, which 
was the essence of the Ego, became thus the symbol of the 
universal cause ; it was the root alike of individual and of 
universal life. It was because of the Will to be that we had 
personal being ; this Will was indeed unconscious, it acted 
with purpose, for it willed to live, but without design. It held 
a sort of reason in it, for all will is reasonable, and so could 
not be conceived or represented as force, which is mechanical 
but not rational. This universal Will to live, as everywhere 
distributed, was a passion for being, a struggle to live, a yearn- 
ing towards realization ; but this passion was blind, save in 
so far as its end was being, and the maintenance of being. 
Schopenhauer agreed with Spinoza in conceiving thought as 
essential to the ultimate Being, though the thought which 
was to Spinoza an attribute of his infinite Substance was to 
Schopenhauer involved in his rational Will ; but he differed 
from Spinoza in recognizing a sort of teleology. Spinoza's 
thought was conceived in the terms of mechanics, Schopen- 
hauer's in the terms of transcendental metaphysic ; and so he 
could never accept the coarse materialism which seemed its 
only alternative. He said, " I am a metaphysician, though 
I do not believe in metaphysics," and he turned scornfully 
from men who argued as if organization could explain 
thought. That he said was the philosophy of the barber's 
man and the apothecary's apprentice ; it was not the philo- 
sophy of reason which conceived that since thought as Will 
explained organization, it was incapable of explanation by 
it. Will, as he conceived it, was therefore a kind of reason- 
able though unconscious struggle towards being and towards 
its continuance. 



AND WHEREIN THEY DIFFERED 125 

But the existence which the Will struggled to realize was 
misery ; it was sorrow. He said that if creation as we know 
it, life as we possess or undergo it, were the work of a conscious 
creator, then he was the greatest of all wrong-doers. He 
must have been an ill-advised god, who could make no 
better sport than to change himself into so lean and hungry 
a world. Consciousness, therefore, he denied to the creator ; 
the existence that was misery could not have been designed, 
or its designer would have been guilty of an unpardonable 
crime. He did not say, imitating the phrase but reversing 
the sense of Leibnitz, " This is the worst of all possible 
worlds " ; but he said, " This world is so bad that no world 
would have been better ; it is something that had better 
never have been." What then was to be done with it ? 
Since it could not be mended, it ought to be ended ; since the 
only way of escape from sorrow was by escaping from ex- 
istence, then the best thing to do was to make this escape. 
And so he preached a doctrine of resignation or abdication 
of will, praised the action by which man gave " the lie to his 
phenomenal existence," and suppressed " the Will to live, 
the kernel and inner nature of that world which is recognized 
as full of misery," and which excites in us when we really 
know it a feeling of " horror." Men were, by the suppression 
of the personal, to suppress the universal Will. Since all 
being was due to Will and the world was as we willed, it 
was by extinction of the Will that extinction of being was 
to be attained. " Voluntary and complete chastity is the 
first step in asceticism or the denial of the Will to live." * 

In this exposition of Schopenhauer we have found in how 
remarkable a degree he repeated or echoed Buddha ; but it 
would be a mistake to conclude that their systems were 
either identical or parallel. While they may have agreed in 
certain metaphysical principles, in ethical spirit and intention 

1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, § 68, p. 449. English Trans- 
lation, vol. i. 491. 



126 THE PERSONAL CONTRAST 

they differed absolutely. Where men are so utterly unlike 
their thoughts cannot be the same. The heart of Buddha's 
Pessimism was pity ; he loved man, and because of his love of 
man he hated the existence that was sorrow. The heart of 
Schopenhauer's pessimism was more contemptuous than piti- 
ful ; his scorn was not so much for life as for the men who 
lived it. There was nothing so alien to Buddha as Cynicism, 
nothing more native to Schopenhauer. The Hindu was 
moved by compassion for his kind, he wished to strike the 
fetters from off the enslaved soul ; but behind the thought 
of the German was a colossal vanity. And when vanity 
measures the worth of men, its judgments tend to be as falsely 
low for others as they are fabulously high for self. Then 
Buddha was a rare and beautiful personality — tender, the 
ideal of all that was attractive and gracious to his people, 
who did not so much believe in his pessimistic Nihilism as 
in his ethical transcendence and the beneficence of his will. 
It was as the ideal of human grace, the realization of human 
loveliness that he was followed. But no process of ideali- 
zation could have made the character of Schopenhauer 
admirable ; and as a beautiful mythology could not gather 
round him, as worship of himself could not redeem his system 
from its native hopelessness, so his Pessimism remains an 
unadorned abstraction, appealing to the intellect without any 
fascination for the heart. Buddha, by his personal transcend- 
ence, raised his system into a religion ; but Schopenhauer's 
personal qualities made it necessary to divorce the man from 
his thought, which became therefore a matter for rational 
criticism rather than imaginative appreciation. 

But perhaps this contrast would convey a false idea if we 
did not add that Schopenhauer was not without disciples. 
He indeed lived long an unbefriended man, for he was a man 
hard to befriend, and ceaseless warfare against things that 
commonly awaken enthusiasm may be due even more to the 
unamiable than to the heroic in character, and the unamiable 



THE DISCIPLES : VON HARTMANN 127 

is never an attractive man. But in his later years disciples 
began to gather round him ; and though his system never 
obtained, like the old transcendentalism, the sovereignty of 
the academic chair, yet he secured from men who loved to 
apply philosophy to life recognition and even acceptance. 

Von Hartmann is the best known of his disciples, and he 
has attempted at once to qualify and to develop his master's 
system. He has attempted so to unite the idea of intelligence 
with that of unconscious Will as to be a speculative theist, 
who speaks of the " Unconscious " when he really means the 
V Over-conscious." He is penetrated, as his master was not, 
with the idea of evolution, though he has criticised its 
Darwinian and scientific forms in very drastic terms ; and he 
has endeavoured to apply it at once to history and religion. 
In his historical theory he has made mankind the victim of 
successive illusions ; as one illusion vanishes another comes, 
leaving the process of final disillusionment, as its supreme 
problem, to the philosophy which, by preaching the vanity of 
human expectations, hopes to promote the beatitude of the 
future. The first, illusion, belonging to the childhood of the 
race, was the dream of happiness in the life that is, which 
was soon discovered to be a vain illusion. It was followed 
by the dream of happiness in a life to come. That, too, has 
proved empty ; and in its place there came the dream of 
happiness for the race in another age, in a great future for 
humanity. That too has proved an illusion ; and now man, 
disillusioned or in process of disillusionment, has before him 
the problem of how to bring this march of misery consoled 
by illusion to its final close, when misery will end with the 
ending of existence. 

3. Now Pessimism has certainly various elements of worth. 
It takes a serious view of the evils of life, and that is a 
matter on which too serious a view is hardly possible. There 
is something admirable in moral passion against suffering, 
and in no respect do we more feel the superficiality of a 



128 APPRECIATION AND CRITICISM 

thinker like Strauss than in his smart but unworthy retort : 
" Von Hartmann says that this world is so bad that none 
would have been better ; Von Hartmann's philosophy is part 
of the world ; and as such it is so bad that it would have 
been better if it had never been." We feel the question to be 
too grave to be so lightly handled and so cavalierly dis- 
missed. We recognize, too, that Schopenhauer was not simply 
indulging his own cynical mood, nor imitating in the West the 
temper and the speculations of the distant East, but repre- 
senting a deep underlying tendency of the time. Our idea of 
the necessity of things, our belief in physical law and order, 
and the inexorable connexion between cause and effect, has 
seriously affected our view of life and of evil. It is an in- 
structive as well as a most serious and significant fact, that 
the more a merely mechanical notion of nature and of man 
prevails, the less hopeful and the less cheerful becomes the 
outlook upon life. The individual is lost in the universal, 
and in losing freedom he loses the power to contend against 
circumstances, and becomes the mere victim of chance. If 
the miseries that happen to us must be, and if we too 
must be, then they and we are equally integral and equally 
necessitated parts of being ; amelioration is impossible to us, 
change is impossible to them, and what remains but hate for 
what we can neither avoid nor change ? If in the midst of 
this necessity man is conceived as only the highest organism 
in the universal struggle for existence, then there is added a 
peculiar element of pathos to the situation ; for in a nature 
where only the strongest survive it means that the feeble 
have no function save that of perishing, and that the system 
under which we live reserves all its mercies for strength and 
cunning. The system where the individual is nothing and 
the whole is all in all, is the system of all others most pro- 
vocative in the individual, especially when he is at once 
conscious of feebleness, and ambitious of pre-eminence and 
Strength, of the most pessimistic theory. In other words, 



OF PESSIMISM: GAIN OR LOSS? 129 

Pessimism is of the nature of a philosophical protest against 
the idea that an unethical force can be the sovereign and 
ultimate arbiter of ethical existence, personal and social. 
And in making this protest it speaks for the common reason 
and heart, which cannot bear to be the tools or the playthings 
of an unheeding mechanical energy. But where Pessimism 
errs is, on the one hand, in making its appeal to an uncon- 
scious will, and in assuming, on the other hand, that the 
creative Will has done its last and best with existence. For 
the fact that evil exists, so far from lessening, really augments 
the need of an ethical Will in the universe to contend against 
it and in behalf of good, and for the rescue of life from the 
dominion of sorrow or suffering. Let us grant that evil is, 
and then let us subtract from man his faith in God, and what 
have we gained — or rather, what have we lost ? We have 
lost, first, a thing that is above all others needed for the 
amelioration of life, to wit, hope. Hope cannot live if the 
individual feels that he stands possessed of a being that is 
misery, helpless, in the face of a mechanical order, to which 
he is no more than an atom or an aggregate of atoms, or in 
the face of an unconscious creator, to whom he is less than 
nothing and vanity. We have lost, secondly, the faith 
through which hope lives, for it would be void of energy 
and inspiration were it without the belief that man is part of 
a system which incorporates a mighty moral Will, able by 
its inexhaustible power of initiative to work towards the 
higher moral ends. When he stands in such a system, he 
feels that he can help to create the conditions of amelioration, 
and take part in the struggle needed to secure the expulsion 
of evil from the realm it would fain rule. And, thirdly, we 
have lost love as a motive to service, and have gotten in 
exchange the emotion of pity, which is more beautiful as a 
feeling than strong as a helper. And pity, when it takes 
counsel of despair, ceases to be beautiful and becomes either 
indignation against the doer of the wrong it cannot redress, 
P.C.R. 9 



130 VISION OF AN INFINITE VOID 

or scorn of him, or it grows cynical in the face of suffering, 
or it turns sentimental, shedding tears that both emasculate 
itself and exasperate the patient. Pessimism may spring from 
pity, but it does not produce philanthropy or benevolence ; 
and in what respect does a will that is not goodwill 
differ for the better from a mechanical energy or a physical 
force ? 

But Pessimism is not simply ethically unsuited to the 
temper and mood of the time, its notion of being is un- 
satisfactory to the common reason. Existence is not an evil, 
though evil exists. Life is not simply something which is 
\ capable of being enjoyed, but something capable of being 
improved, and the greatest of all pleasures is to work for its 
improvement. It is all the more to be valued that it is not 
perfect, only capable of perfection. The normal attitude of 
man to life has something infinitely more healthy in it and 
truer to the truth of things than the attitude of the man who 
identifies negative evil with positive good. To speak of 
non-existence as better than existence, or to speak of the 
world as so bad that it had better never have been, is to say 
what no man of healthy mind can be got in the heart of him 
or in his higher and better moments to believe. Let us try 
to give the notion concrete form, and, in contrast with our 
sunlit, star-filled space, to imagine an infinite void, — though 
the very attempt to imagine it will prove its impossibility, for 
non-entity can only be conceived by being translated into 
some form of being. Still let us think we can do it, and 
attempt to make the bold essay to represent in our fancy 
nothing but vacant space where now circle the worlds that 
shine to each other as stars — nothing but darkness, no sun- 
light to make the day, no starlight to break or beautify the 
night ; nothing but death where now there is life ; no glad, 
swift-darting fish in the waters of river or sea ; no river or sea 
for them to be glad in ; no green earth for flocks to feed on 
or flocks for the green earth ; no fragrant and lovely flowers, 



EVIL NOT THE ALL OF EXISTENCE 131 

no laden bees to hum, no lark that, like a blithe spirit, soars 
as it sings, — 

" In the golden lightning of the sunken sun, 
O'er which clouds are brightening, 
Thou dost float and run 
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun"; 

no man to think great thoughts, to do battle for the true and 
right ; no woman to love, to grow strong and happy by loving ; 
no race to weave the wreath that crowns it with beauty out 
of the pale lilies of death and the warm red roses of life ; 
nothing but utter, absolute vacancy, a dismal, dark, dumb 
infinite, where now lives and moves and abides a vivid and 
vocal and reasonable universe, peopled by minds that look 
before and after, and read in things visible the mysteries and 
the presence of the Eternal God. And then, when we have 
fairly envisaged the two alternatives, let us try to compare 
them, — if, indeed, a glorious reality be comparable with an 
irrational impossibility, — and let us ask soberly, whether the 
negation of being can stand in thought alongside the idea 
of a world which is radiant in its very shadow, and, in spite 
of all its evil, is good, because capable of being made ever 
better ? What the answer would be does not lie open to 
doubt : the normal man loves being by the compulsion of 
his rational nature, and not simply by the force of an 
irrational Will ; and it is not his own existence that he 
loves, — did it stand alone he would hate it, — but he loves 
being as a whole, for as a whole it lives in him, and in the 
whole he lives. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE QUESTION AS AFFECTED BY THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 

B. Some Suggestions towards a Solution 

THE criticisms in which the previous chapter concluded 
only emphasize the philosophical difficulties that beset 
Pessimism ; they do not answer the intellectual and ethical 
difficulties that create it. The belief in God is an excellent 
thing when we face evil as something to be vanquished ; but 
when we face evil as something to be explained, the belief 
is itself surrounded with serious difficulties. If evil is such 
as, if not to justify Pessimism, yet so far to explain it as to 
compel us to say that it is not without reason and ought 
therefore to be heard, — then we must farther admit that 
the higher our conception of God, the holier, the more 
benevolent, we conceive Him to be, the greater and the 
graver become the difficulties concerned with the creation 
and government of the world. In a word, we are faced with 
the venerable problem — How has it happened that, under the 
rule of an infinitely good, powerful, righteous Being, evil has 
come into existence and still continues to exist ? This is a 
question that our criticism of Pessimism but compels us the 
more seriously to consider and to discuss. 

§ I. The Limits and Terms of the Discussion 

I. Let us begin then our attempt at suggesting some factors 
towards the solution of this problem by frankly expressing 
the idea which gives it all its gravity : although it be granted 



• THE RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD 133 

that man is responsible for the introduction of moral evil 
(and we here recognize the fact that many would refuse to 
grant so much), yet we must conceive the Creator as respon- 
sible for the system under which it was introduced, which 
made it possible, which allowed it to become actual, and 
which now follows it with moral penalties and physical 
sufferings. We ought not to shrink from affirming what we"" 
have called the responsibility of God ; we do not think, if we 
may reverently so speak, that He Himself would deny it ; 
certainly it is an idea that lies at the root of the New Testa- 
ment, and especially of its doctrines touching redemption and 
grace. It may, indeed, be argued that responsibility implies 
a higher authority, a judge to whom we must give an account, 
and whose award is final ; but this is a juridical rather than 
an ethical view of the matter. The tribunal in moral respon- 
sibility is personal and real, but in legal responsibility it 
is judicial and formal. The sovereign is as responsible to 
the citizens for good order in the state as the citizens are 
responsible to the judge for obedience to the law. The father 
may be said to be morally responsible to his family, while he 
is legally responsible to the common law for its maintenance 
and education ; but the two responsibilities are neither iden- 
tical nor coincident, the moral being higher, subtler, more 
comprehensive, and imperious than the legal, asking qualities 
of character, forethought, prudence, forbearance and courtesy, 
which the law is powerless to demand. And we may, with 
all humility, speak in somewhat similar language of God. 
The older theology, with its emphasis on God's indignation 
and horror at sin, needs to be supplemented by a thought 
which affirms His responsibility for the sinner. The guilt of 
man does not by itself justify God, for the order under which 
it happened He instituted, and the system under which it 
continues He upholds. Hence the vindication of God must 
come from some other principle than His hatred of the evil 
which theologians define as the violation of the divine law. 



134 EVIL ACTIVE AND PASSIVE 

2. We recognize, then, that we are here concerned with a 
problem which gravely affects our belief in the goodness, the 
wisdom, and the justice of God ; and that it were better to 
deny His existence altogether than to believe Him to be 
less than infinitely perfect. We acknowledge, too, that the 
beauty of nature, which has been so much emphasized and so 
often appealed to by both classical and Christian theists, is, 
for many reasons, here an irrelevant consideration ; for it 
represents only one side of nature, and that the least obvious 
and the least helpful of the sides, which she turns to the vast 
multitudes of our race. Our concern, then, is with evil, which is 
the sad and tragic fact that looks out at us from man every- 
where and refuses to be ignored. It may be said to be of two 
kinds — evil that may be suffered, and evil that may be done. 
The evil that may be suffered it is usual to term physical ; 
the evil that may be done, moral ; and though it is impossible 
in actual experience to disjoin them, yet it will be better that 
they be considered apart. They belong, indeed, to entirely 
distinct categories : physical evil is incidental, occasional or 
relative, and may be termed negative or privative ; but moral 
evil is positive, and may be termed actual or real. The 
phrase " physical evil " is not indeed used as the equivalent 
of " bodily suffering." Were it, the usage would raise an 
even vaster question than the one we are attempting to 
discuss, viz., the ethics of creation as regards the whole 
animal kingdom, where the animal suffers as well as the man, 
and disease and death reign, and the strong prey upon the 
weak, and ferocity gluts itself with the blood of the feeble 
and inoffensive. The principles that underlie and guide our 
discussion may apply even to this question, but the applica- 
tion is not to be directly made. Our question concerns man, 
for in him the physical shades into the moral problem, and 
physical evil means all the sufferings he may have to endure, 
whether bodily or mental, nervous or sympathetic, alike as a 
distinct individual and a social unit, alike as a natural being, 



EXPERIENCE NO PAINLESS PROCESS 135 

fleshly and mortal, and as a human being, sharing in the 
special history of a people and in the collective fortunes and 
immortality of the race. 

Taken in this large sense, then, physical evil may be 
endured or suffered either by an innocent or by a guilty 
person, and its being and function may be in both cases, 
though for different reasons, equally natural and necessary. 
To acquire experience can never be a wholly agreeable or 
painless process ; if it were, the experience would have no 
educative or expansive value. If happiness consisted in being 
set in a perennial stream of agreeable feelings, it would soon 
become the most wearisome of states ; for into a state of 
mere enjoyment there would soon come nauseous monotony, 
which would be fatal to ultimate pleasure. We have need 
here to clear our minds of cant, and to recognize frankly that 
even heaven cannot be the mere synonym of the agreeable, 
and ought not to be conceived as if it were. If men in 
beatitude are to know discipline, they must put forth effort ; 
and if there is to be effort, there must be strain ; and if there 
is to be strain, there must be emulation ; and if there is to 
be emulation, there must be the divine rivalry which finds 
pleasure in excelling and in the endeavour to excel. The 
man who has thought deeply has also doubted severely, and 
doubted not merely whether there be a God, but whether 
there be any moral good, or any worth in any being. The 
state of doubt may have meant to him misery or even 
despair, but it was the necessary and strictly natural though 
transitional condition of a man realizing at once the limits, 
the resources, and the possibilities of his own intellectual and 
moral being. It may be described as an evil, just as partial 
knowledge is an evil as compared with omniscience ; but it 
is more excellent than its complete negation would be ; for a 
higher beatitude of thought is realized through it than could 
be realized without it. What may thus be called the pain 
or suffering intrinsic in a created intellect feeling its way 



136 CLASSES OF PHYSICAL EVIL 

towards the Uncreated Light, may stand as an example 
of evils involved in the very terms of created and therefore 
limited being, but so involved as to be the condition of 
higher good. We may not, then, think of all physical evil 
as either calamitous or even mischievous in character and 
action ; whether it is either or neither will depend upon its 
reason or cause, upon its seat and tendency : nor till it be 
viewed in relation to moral evil can we really judge whether 
it be positive or negative in its nature, a real or a privative 
thing, the suffering that simply makes sorrow or the sense of 
want that is the condition of all activity and attainment. 

It will therefore be convenient, for the purposes of our 
discussion, that we should deal with the two classes of evil 
as distinct, yet as essentially related. 

A. Physical Evil: its Kinds and Functions 

We may divide physical evils into three classes : I, those 
that arise from man's relation to nature, and nature's to man : 
2, those that are native to his own being : 3, those inflicted 
upon him by men, whether ancestors or contemporaries. 

§ II. Man in the Hands of Nature 

I. The evils that arise from the inter-relations of man and 
nature are an innumerable multitude, and fall into a variety 
of classes, (a) There are those wholly due to the destructive 
or terrific forces of Nature herself. They may be represented 
by the storm, the hurricane, and the earthquake. These 
indeed are forces that work appalling disasters ; and we may 
not forget that a single calamity like the earthquake at 
Lisbon raised more painful doubts as to the wisdom and the 
goodness of God than all the speculative and anti-Christian 
criticism of the eighteenth century. 

(/3) There is the class of evils which Nature works by 
failure to respond to the labour and the skill of man. These 






BUT NO EVIL PURELY PHYSICAL 137 

may be represented by the famine, whether caused by the 
drought which has allowed the seed to die in the ground, or by 
the flood that has rotted the roots of the grain or of the fruit 
which man has been patiently waiting for, or by the locust, the 
caterpillar, and the cankerworm, which devour what he had 
painfully been rearing for food. 

(7) The third class may be represented by the disaster 
which Nature brings upon man through the destruction of 
the works he has invented, in order that he might turn her 
forces to his own service. Here is the storm which brings 
shipwreck, the tempest that lays waste his cities, the lightning 
that smites his proudest buildings into ruin. 

(S) We may find a fourth class in the evils that spring 
from man's neglect of Nature, and the revenge which she 
takes for the neglect. Here we have the pestilence and 
disease in its hundred forms of slow or swift death. 

2. But it is hopeless to attempt to classify the infinite forms 
of the suffering which Nature inflicts upon man, though what 
has been sketched is enough to show that Nature seldom acts 
alone ; and before we burden her with the blame we ought 
to attempt to discover how far Nature or how far man is the 
more responsible factor of the evil. The two, indeed, are so 
curiously intermingled that we may say, the evils accom- 
plished by Nature alone are but few ; those wrought by 
Nature and man in conjunction form a multitude which no 
man can number ; while those caused by man's own ignor- 
ance or neglect of natural forces constitute an infinite, a 
never-ending series. But if we cannot exhaustively classify 
physical evils, and trace them to their causes in Nature alone 
or in man alone, or in the two combined, we may say certain 
things concerning their functions. 

i. The natural forces that now and then work so disastrously 
for man are among his most beneficent educators ; he has 
to study them that he may master them, and the more he 
studies their secret the greater the mastery he attains. It is 



138 NATURE EDUCATES MAN 

marvellous what limits he has set to the destructive power of 
Nature ; and in setting these limits he has learned the most 
beneficent of all lessons — that he conquers by obedience, and 
commands by obeying. Nature and her forces must be 
known if they are to be controlled or turned into servants. 
It is a moral lesson, though it comes in a physical form. Man 
acquires the wonderful art of reaching his end by following 
a way that is not his own, but a larger and better way than 
his. The educative force of Nature exceeds our capacity to 
acquire. We have all learned of her in total unconscious- 
ness more than we have learned consciously from all other 
teachers. We have imitated her methods, and we have calcu- 
lated her forces. At her bidding the farmer has learned 
how to till and sow and reap ; the fisherman how to ply his 
craft upon the great waters ; the mechanic how to generate 
force and how to build the engine to use the force he has 
generated. The navigator has learned from stars and sun 
how to steer his ship, and has compelled the currents that 
run through the earth so to point the hands of his compass 
as to indicate the way in which he should go upon the sea. 
Study of Nature has thus educated man, and out of her 
school he has issued wiser than he could have come from 
the hands of an earth-mother who had nothing to teach him 
of obedience and self-control. 

ii. But the suffering which Nature can inflict on man has 
helped to educate him even more in humanity than in the 
arts. She has, so to speak, by her very inhumanity, made man 
humane. The awful use which he himself can make of her 
destructive forces for his own ends, is putting a bit and a 
bridle upon his more brutal powers, his lust for blood, his 
love of battle and conquest. But still more has it taught 
him to see that the men who suffer at Nature's hands, are 
men he is bound to help. The shipwreck calls for the life- 
boat, and the hardy men who stand safe on shore can brave 
the terror of the storm in pity for those who are threatened 



IN ARTS AND IN HUMANITY 139 

by the devouring sea ; the famine that sends gaunt death 
into the homes of one people touches another with pity, and 
helps to create among those who are alien in blood and 
speech the feeling of kinship, the gracious and kindiy sense 
of brotherhood. In the darker ages pestilence was dreadful, 
for it roused, by the fear of contagion and the horror of death, 
the fiercest passions that can burn in the breast of man ; but 
the more men have penetrated into the secrets of Nature, 
the more have they learned their community of interests, and 
the more have they been moved by a feeling which has 
turned into the passion to fight disease, even though they 
themselves might enjoy immunity from it. Nature has indeed 
been here a great educator in human pity and helpfulness ; 
the very suffering she has inflicted has disciplined man in 
mercy. The time was when natural calamities divided men ; 
the time is now when calamities evoke the sympathy that 
hastens to help ; and the time will be when the sympathy, 
anticipating the calamity, will restrict its reign, reduce its 
proportions, and, by the amelioration of Nature and the lot 
of man, tend if not to eliminate famine and pestilence 
from his life, yet to lessen all their attendant miseries and 
fears, and to educe at the same time those higher humanities 
which had otherwise remained latent within him. 

iii. And so man, in the presence of the forces that seem 
in Nature to dominate his life, is learning to organize it 
on a higher level and after a humaner sort. They who have 
learned most of the secrets of Nature, especially as to how to 
keep her wholesome, to make her healthy and to turn her 
into a kindly minister to man, feel themselves compelled to 
impart the secrets they have learned to less forward or less 
favoured peoples. It is a curious but instructive law of 
human progress that we learn by the evil we inflict not only 
to cease from inflicting it, but also that we are in humanity 
akin with those we may have wronged. The people who 
enslaved the negro learned through the penal consequences 



140 NATURE INEXORABLE 

that followed to themselves from their own act the humanity 
of the men they had enslaved. We slowly discover that the 
secrets of Nature are not the property of the men who dis- 
cover them, but of the whole race. Since we are all children 
of the one mother and suckled at the one broad bosom, we 
come to feel that the mysteries of the motherhood of the 
earth are not for those who think' themselves the elder-born 
or the favoured sons, but for the whole brood, the collective 
human family. Our common dependence upon Nature be- 
comes a bond of unity between all the sections of mankind ; 
the life we live is one, though its forms and modes are as 
multitudinous as the units of the race. 

iv. But experience slowly teaches us that by far the 
larger proportion of the suffering that man endures at the 
hands of Nature is not due to Nature at all, but to man. It 
is the result of neglect, of improvidence, of carelessness ; it is 
due to the ten thousand causes which turn things preventible 
and innocent into things inevitable and injurious. Nature 
exists for man, not man for Nature ; but if she exists for him, 
it is to teach him to transcend her, to make him ever more of 
a man, raising each generation above its predecessor. To do 
this she must awaken the energy and forethought that are in 
him, compel him to study that he may know, to imitate that 
he may prevail. And for this reason Nature, in order that 
she may be beneficent, must be inexorable in her laws. The 
greatest calamity that could happen to men would be the 
grant of supernatural aid whenever they had by negligence or 
ignorance, or any act of wilfulness, involved themselves in 
straits. The very miracle that was worked to stay Nature 
in a destructive course, or calm her in a tempestuous mood, 
would arrest the progress and the amelioration of mankind ; 
for by teaching man to depend upon external help it would 
take from him the desire to improve, to trust his own 
intelligence, to obey the law of his own conscience and 
reason, and to amend by effort his own life and the lives of 



THAT SHE MAY BE BENEFICENT 141 

men. If the stormy sea had been subdued whenever it 
threatened to engulf him, or if the hurricane, when it promised 
to overwhelm him, had been softened into the zephyr that 
blows gentle and sweet upon the violet, or if the lightning had 
been arrested in its swift and lurid course as it approached 
the orbit within which he moved, — we might never have had 
any dreadful tales of shipwreck or other disasters of the deep ; 
but still more surely we should never have had the marvellous 
engineering and the brave enterprize which have built the 
big ships, bidden them traverse the mighty ocean, and turn 
its once dividing waters into the crowded highway of the 
nations across which they carry their wealth to the exchanges 
that enrich and federate mankind. We all know that there 
is nothing so fatal to the manhood of a people as the charity 
that pauperizes. Were we so to relieve the improvident as 
to make him as well off as the provident, so to protect the 
thoughtless from his thoughtlessness that he would suffer 
as little as the thoughtful, so to fill the squanderer's hand, 
whenever he had emptied it, that he would know less ot 
want than the industrious and the careful — would not the 
result be to set the highest possible premium on the shiftless 
and retrogressive qualities of men ? And so, were men, 
whenever they provoked Nature, or challenged her to use her 
forces to destroy them, to be saved from the consequences of 
their own folly ; were they, whenever they invited calamity, 
to be miraculously lifted out of it, they would, — in the very 
degree of the frequency and efficiency with which the super- 
natural power interfered on their behalf, — have their manhood 
injured. Nature must be faithful to herself if she is to do 
her best for man. In her severity lies the education which 
is the last thing that man could afford to lose. 

§ III. Evils peculiar to Man 

I. But there is a second class of evils — those native to 
man's own being — which are also an infinite multitude in 



142 DEATH MAN'S TRAGEDY 

themselves, while dismal and distressing in their causes, 
consequences, and incidents. They imply man's community 
with Nature, his participation in the ebb and in the flow of 
her life. There is disease, hunger, thirst, the struggle to live 
in the face of a hard and ruthless order ; there is birth in 
pain, there is life in toil, there is death in agony or despair. 
Indeed, the whole of the evil native to us may be summed up 
in that one word, mortality. Here is man, a conscious being, 
able in imagination to retrace the ages behind him, to look 
into the issues of the life around him, to forecast the future 
when there shall be for him no earth, no sea, no sky ; here 
he is a creature able to think of the eternal God while con- 
scious that he himself is only mortal, and has had measured 
out to him only his pitiful threescore years and ten. Is it not 
a shameful and a painful thing to be doomed to so brief a 
life, which must be lived under conditions so narrow, to be 
like a steed fit for the chariot of the sun, yet forced to bear 
the dreary drudgery of dragging behind him the tumbril of 
death ? This is a hard matter to explain ; it comes so near 
our own experience, it appeals so urgently to heart and 
imagination as well as to reason ; for the awful cruelty of 
death lies in its not only ending one's own life, but in so often 
making desolate innocent and helpless lives that would other- 
wise be happy. If it were one's own loss only, it would be 
possible to die like a Stoic without a murmur and without a 
tear. It is the desolation of the living that is so painful to 
thought, turning death into the sum of all our miseries. But 
when all has been thought and said, why should death seem 
an evil ? Birth is not, and surely death is but the comple- 
ment and counterpart of birth. The one is because the other 
is ; it is because the grave is never full that the cradle is 
never empty. Then how without death could man realize 
the meaning of life ? How feel the immensity, the possibili- 
ties, the god-like qualities, the capability of endless gain or 
loss contained within the terms of his own being ? The 



THE LEGEND OF JUBAL 143 

picture of man before and after he knew death in the 
" Legend of Jubal" is as true to experience as to imagination. 
In the old, soft, sweet days before men knew death, when 
all that was known of it was the single black spot in the 
memory of Cain, his descendants lived in gladsome idlesse ; 
they played, they sang, they loved, they danced, in a life 
that had no gravity and no greatness ; but when the second 
death came, and men saw that there had come to one of 
their own race a sleep from which there was no awaking, a 
new meaning stole into life. The horizon which limited it 
denned it, and made it great. Time took a new value ; 
affection, by growing more serious, became nobler ; men 
thought of themselves more worthily and of their deeds more 
truly when they saw that a night came when no man could 
work. Friends and families lived in a tenderer light when 
the sun was known to shine but for a season ; earth became 
lovelier when they thought the place which knew them now 
would soon know them no more. The limit set to time drove 
their thoughts out towards eternity. The idea of the death, 
which was to claim them, bade them live in earnest, made 
them feel that there was something greater than play ; for 
death had breathed into life the spirit out of which all tragic 
and all heroic things come. 

Death has thus added to the pomp and the fruitfulness, to 
the glory and the grandeur of life. Without it we should 
have had no struggle of will against destiny, of the thought 
which wanders through eternity and beats itself into strength 
and hope against the bars and the barriers of time ; without 
it man would have had no sense of his kinship with the 
Infinite, for the finite would have been enough for him. 
And if a soul made for eternity were to be withered by time, 
would not that, in another and darker sense than attends the 
end of our mortal being, be the death of all that is worthiest 
to live? And has not time, by her successive generations, 
been enriched, enlarged, made varied and wealthy as she 



144 WHAT LIFE GAINS 

never could have been by a race of immortal Adams, un- 
changed and deathless ? It is a poor and a pitiful dream to 
imagine that it were a happier than a mortal state were man 
to know no death, but to endure in characterless innocency, 
untouched by the shadow feared of man, never feeling the 
light within made resplendent by the darkness death shed 
without. Instead of a single generation we have a multitude 
of successive generations, each fuller of humanity than the 
one which went before. Instead of one individual we have 
an endless series of mortal persons on the way to immortality, 
each a miniature deity, each in time yet destined for eternity, 
each with inexhaustible potentialities within him, each real- 
izing himself under the conditions which a measured existence 
affords, and all contributing to make the wondrous and varied 
life which we call the history of man. Who will venture to 
say that the dream of an innocent Eden, a single paradise 
of immortals, is comparable to this majestic procession of 
mortals moving as to the music of a celestial dead march 
through time towards immortality? 

2. As to the desolation that comes to those who lose, who 
would dare to make light of it? Yet must we not recognize 
that even this is not without a beneficence of its own ? 
The thought of possible loss touches with tenderness all 
the relations of life. It explains the watchfulness of the 
mother, the ungrudging labour of the father, the solicitous 
care of the wife, the affection and forethought of the 
husband. Those who love the living feel life to be all the 
sweeter and dearer because it is so transitory. And if death 
brings loss, does it not mean that before creatures could be 
lost, they had to be possessed ? Here, let us say, is a young 
man full of promise. He had been a bright and happy boy, 
the pride of his mother's heart, the light of his father's 
eye ; he had been an earnest student, the joy of his tutors, 
the hope of his school and his college, raising high expec- 
tations even in the withered breast of his professor. He had 






AND WHAT DEATH GIVES 145 

been the centre of a brilliant circle of friends, who talked 
with him, walked with him, disputed and argued with him 
concerning high things, ever stimulated by his brilliant 
thought and vivid speech. And he comes to the threshold 
of life, with school and university behind him, high hopes and 
fair visions before him, and noble purposes looking out from 
his radiant face. And just then a fatal disease claims him 
as its own, and he dies, while men whose hearts are dry as 
summer dust linger on in what they call life. Discipline 
had been gained, weapons mastered, and skill acquired ; time 
and opportunity alone were needed for him to achieve great 
things. But death denied him what he needed and what all 
men desired him to have. And was not the act ruthless, and 
can it be counted anything else than evil ? Was not a good 
life lost ? and could the loss be anything but a sore grief to 
some, an injury to many and a calamity to all ? But even 
here there is another side to be looked at : he had not 
lived in vain ; his life had been a large good. For 
more than twenty years he had made a home richer than 
without him it could ever have been. In school and 
college he had made ideals realizable that apart from him 
would never have been dreamed of, and by doing this 
did he not enhance in the men he touched the value of 
life ? And did not his death compel them to feel that they 
must live his life as well as their own ? He who writes 
these things once knew a man who was to him companion, 
friend, and more than brother. They lived, they thought, 
they argued together ; together they walked on the hillside 
and by the sea shore ; they had listened to the wind as it 
soughed through the trees, and to the multitudinous 
laughter of the waves as they broke upon the beach : to- 
gether they had watched the purple light which floated 
radiant above the heather, and together they had descended 
into the slums of a great city, where no light was nor 
any fragrance, and had faced the worst depravity of our 
P.C.R. 10 



146 MAN AS CAUSE OF SUFFERING 

kind. Each kept hope alive in the other and stimulated 
him to high endeavour and better purpose ; but though 
the same week saw the two friends settled in chosen 
fields of labour, the one settled only to be called home, 
the other to remain and work his tale of toil until his 
longer day be done. But the one who died seemed 
to leave his spirit behind in the breast of the man who 
survived ; and he has lived ever since, and lives still, feeling 
as if the soul within him belonged to the man who 
died. And may we not say, this experience is common 
and interprets the experience of the race ? Death has to 
be viewed not as a matter of a single person, but of 
collective man ; and it works out the good of collective 
man by doing no injustice to the individual, but rather 
using him to fulfil the highest function it is granted to 
mortal men to perform. So let us say that however men 
may conceive death, it belongs to those sufferings by which 
mankind learns obedience, and is made perfect. 

§ IV. Evils Man suffers from Men 

r — 

I. The third class of physical evils are the sufferings that 

are inflicted on man by men. These are indeed infinitely 
vaster, darker and more terrible than the sufferings in- 
flicted on him by Nature. The sufferings caused by want 
of heart, by want of thought, by ambition, by greed, by 
passion, by pride and vanity, by neglect and presumption, 
by all the lusts that ravin and devour, are in number, in 
kind, in intention, and in effect, the transcendent sufferings 
sof_ the world. And while they may be physical in form 
they are almost uniformly ethical in source, and also in 
their consequences. It were vain to attempt to classify 
evils so infinitely varied in character and in quality, but 
their types may be determined according to their more 
common sources, (i) There are evils that spring from the 
constitution of the race, the law of descent and inheritance 



THE LAW OF HEREDITY 147 

(2) Evils that come through the very affections that 
create the home and the family, which includes the prob- 
lems raised by the nature and relations of the sexes. (3) 
Evils that spring from the social constitution and civil 
relations of man, or man as organized into communities 
and classes, into nations and states. (4) Evils that spring 
from economical or industrial causes, from man as a being 
that must work in order that he may live. (5) Evils that 
come from international rivalries, the jealousies, conflicts, 
and collisions now of uncivilized tribes, and now of colossal 
civilized powers. 

With only certain of these evils, those which, as involved in 
the very constitution of the race, raise grave questions as to 
the power and wisdom of the Creator, -are we here specially 
concerned, though we may later have to deal in more detail 
with others. The law of heredity is a serious problem for 
any one who regards Nature as moral in source and in 
purpose. How has it happened that a wise and beneficent 
Creator so constituted the race as to place in the hands of 
individuals enormous powers which they are, from the very 
necessity of the case, totally unfit to exercise ? How is it 
that He has wedded together the purest affection with the 
basest passion, and made it possible for man to feel and 
act like a brute to one who feels and acts like an angel ? 
And how is it that He has so formed the highest of all His 
creatures that this brutish person may not only sacrifice to 
his lusts the chastity of the living but also destroy the virtue, 
the happiness, and the health of the unborn ? Does it not 
argue some signal ethical incapacity or moral indifference in 
the Creator first to create natures in which the angel and the 
devil so intermix, and then to endow them, even when they 
are most demoniac, with such power to control the plastic 
and productive forces of life ? 

2. Now, while we ought to distinguish in this problem 
the elements which concern man from those which concern 



148 MAN AS SOCIAL ORGANISM 

Providence, yet it is necessary to see how intimately and 
inextricably they are interrelated. So far as man is a 
factor of evil, especially in those functions which involve 
the good of posterity, it is evident that we judge him not 
as if he were a mere natural being, but as one who stands 
in a higher order, who has duties he ought to fulfil, and 
duties which may forbid him to indulge his natural in- 
stincts. That the constitution of the man is what it is, 
and that man has sexual and sensual passions which 
impel towards licentious living, is not allowed, then, to 
extenuate the evil he may do. On the contrary, he is held 
bound to obey a law which would turn Nature's way in 
his hands into an instrument of immense good ; and, if he 
neglects it, he is charged with guilt odious in the degree 
that he has made Nature the partner and servant of his 
offence. Now this means that we conceive Nature to be 
good in herself, evil only when she falls into evil hands, 
and is made a minister of sin ; that her Author designed 
her, as appears from the higher law under which man 
lives, to serve moral ends by being in the service of moral 
beings. But we cannot so think without being forced to 
go much farther. Nothing has contributed more to the 
moral education of the race than its physical constitution ; 
through it the feeling of responsibility and obligation in 
the individual to the whole has been evoked and defined. 
The sense of the harm man could do to man has possessed 
the individual conscience with fear, and has armed the social 
conscience with all its sanctions and almost all its terrors. 
The knowledge of the power for mischief incarnated in a 
reckless man, has made society surround him with restraints ; 
and the appeal of the silent unborn generations to the latent 
fatherhood in man, has induced him to bind himself about 
with the obligations that help to make and to keep him 
moral. Growth in civilization may be measured by the 
limitations progressively laid upon man's power to harm man, 



A LESSON IN RESPONSIBILITY 149 

just as growth in religion is marked by his increased will to 
help. Law is meant for the lawless and disobedient, and in 
it we may see expressed man's feeling that the order of the 
race is rooted in justice and that its life ought to be regulated 
by duty. And could we conceive what Nature would be in 
the hands of a wholly moralized mankind ? The constitution 
which now works in a way so mixed of good and evil, would 
then work wholly for good. The law which now transmits 
so much misery and disease and vice from parent to child, 
would then bequeath virtue and truth. The inheritance of 
the race would be a cumulative good ; it would represent 
the stores of health and sanity, wisdom and knowledge, 
acquired in one generation and transmitted to its successor in 
order that they might be made into a worthier and richer 
heritage for those who were to follow after. We are not to 
judge what is as if it were the ideal and the eternal. It is 
neither, but it has been designed for both ; and though evil 
may use for its own ends what was designed for good, yet 
good will reclaim its own and reign the more securely that 
reason has learned through experience that Nature is holy 
and just. 

In this discussion we have tried to deal with the ques- 
tion as it affects the system under which we live here and 
now ; yet at no moment have we thought of man as if 
this life were the whole of him. If it is a poor philosophy 
which calls in the rewards and penalties of another life to 
redress the wrongs caused by the unequal distribution of 
pleasure and pain in this, yet no argument which attempts 
to justify the ways of God to men can afford to forget the 
full measure and duration of God's relations to man. Time 
and Eternity are one ; he who is and he who is to be are 
one and the same person ; and his life, its meaning, purpose, 
discipline, can never be understood if he be regarded as a 
mere mortal being, with no existence save what begins with 



150 EVIL MAY DISCIPLINE 

birth and ends at death. The scale on which an immortal 
being is planned is not commensurate with any measure of 
mortality ; and what to a mortal might well seem unmiti- 
gated evil may appear to the immortal only a discipline the 
better qualifying him for his immortality. We might well 
imagine that were his mortal life to be his whole and sole 
existence, then it ought to be like a sweet pastoral melody ; 
but an immortal life is so vast that the prelude to it may 
fitly reach the proportions of a mighty epic, or be distin- 
guished by the tragic situations that beseem an immense 
drama. 

B. Moral Evil: its Nature, Origin, and 
Continuance 

In the course of this discussion it has become evident that 
the two classes of evil so shade into each other that it is 
impossible to draw a clear boundary line between them, and 
say, " On this side moral evil lies, and on that side physical." 
As a matter of fact they are inextricably interwoven. Sin 
determines an infinite number and variety of the forms 
which suffering assumes, whether as regards action, quality, 
character, tendency, or function. Yet, vague as it is, in the 
last analysis the distinction holds ; physical evil is the evil 
men suffer, moral evil is the evil they do. The one falls 
under the categories of choice and action, the other under 
those of result and consequences. And this means that 
moral evil is due to the act of the personal will, but physical 
is conditioned by the operation of fixed laws, or an estab- 
lished order. The moment the will has chosen, the fixed law 
begins to operate ; and so, though the act may be transient, 
the consequences are permanent. In its essence the act 
creative of moral evil is, to use a juridical phrase, "a violation 
of law"; to speak with the Stoics, it is a refusal to "Jive 
according to nature " ; to employ the language of Butler, it is 



BUT IS NOT DISCIPLINARY 151 

the failure to recognize "the authority of conscience," or in that 
of Kant, it is to decline to obey " the categorical imperative." 
In these cases "law," "nature," "conscience," "categorical 
imperative," are but impersonal names for the ethical 
sovereignty of God ; and the denial of this sovereignty means 
the alienation in will and character of man from his Maker. 
It is this denial and consequent alienation that creates and 
constitutes moral evil in its two ultimate forms, act and 
character, or choice and habit, or will and nature. 

On account then of the origin and essential quality of 
moral evil as the revolt of the personal will against the 
sovereignty under which it was constituted to live, we cannot 
describe it as disciplinary ; but only as absolute and un- 
relieved evil. It is bad as seen in the individual ; it mars 
the god-like beauty which is native to the soul ; it steals 
away the charm which made it seem to the eye of its 
Maker very good ; it isolates it from the source of life ; it 
removes it from the breast of the Almighty who breathed 
it into being. It grows by what it feeds on, for in sinning 
there is no cure of sin, there is only increase of the evil. 
But if it be bad in the individual, it is worse when incor- 
porated in families and turned into a sort of inheritance ; and 
worst of all when it possesses and dominates the collective 
race. And so far from dying as civilization advances, it 
grows subtler the more civilized the race becomes. The 
man who is naked and unashamed is not depraved by his 
nakedness ; it is the knowledge that he ought to be clothed 
which begets shame, and it is shame that begets depravity. 
Unconscious sin does not brutalize, it is conscious sin which 
corrupts the nature and wastes the whole man. And what 
is growth in civilization but increase of the knowledge that 
makes us conscious of sin ? And so our modern city is 
depraved in a sense that no primitive community ever was. 
There is more hope of the conversion of the unclothed 
savage than of the clothed and skilled and inured wrong-doer 



152 THROUGH THE SUFFERING OF MAN 

of our East-end dens or of our West-end clubs. Hence out 
of both our personal and our collective experience comes the 
problem — How is it that the Creator has allowed all the fair 
promise and all the divine potentiality of man to be falsified 
by the rise of sin and the cumulative wickedness of all the 
generations of men ? 

There are, then, two main questions to be discussed, one 
as to the origin or introduction of moral evil, the other as to 
its continuance and consequent diffusion. 

§ V. Moral Evil and God 

As to the origin or introduction of moral evil it may be 
argued : — " Man has indeed done evil, and may, in a sense, 
be described as its author, but this does not exonerate God. 
For man could not have sinned unless he had been made 
capable of sinning. Why was he so made ? And having 
been so made, why was he not so watched and superintended 
as to make this evil deed of his impossible ? To say that he 
did it is but to saddle him with the secondary responsibility ; 
the primary responsibility is the Creator's, who so made man 
that he could do this thing, and so neglected and forsook 
him at the critical moment as to leave him no choice but to 
follow his inclinations and hasten to do it." The answer 
to this argument will compel us to enter a more speculative 
region than any we have as yet attempted to penetrate. 
For the question, why God permitted moral evil, or rather, 
why He made man capable of doing it, requires, before it 
can become either intelligible or soluble, the exposition and 
analysis of certain underlying and regulative ideas. These 
relate, chiefly, to our modes of conceiving the Deity and the 
creation in themselves and in their mutual relations. 

I. Well, then, it is not possible to think of the Creator 
under the categories of an abstract Absolute or an isolated 
Perfection. We must, if we think of Him in relation to the 
universe, bring Him more or less under the conditions of a 



EVIL BECOMES THE CONCERN OF GOD 153 

related being, one to whom space and time are not abstract 
forms of thought, but modes of activity and terms of real 
existence. For Deity as Creator is not a mere Abstraction, 
an unconditioned Absolute ; but He acts and He produces, 
and to act is to be conditioned, and to produce is to be 
related. Now conditions, as they affect action, are of two 
kinds, external and internal. 

i. External conditions are such as these — impossibilities 
must exist to God as well as to men ; possible things 
Omnipotence may achieve, impossible things not even 
Omnipotence can accomplish. To be Almighty is not to be 
able to perform what is, in the nature of the case, incapable 
of performance ; and this inability does not in any respect 
limit the might, it only helps to define its province. These 
inabilities or impossibilities may be said to be of three kinds : 
physical, intellectual and moral. The moral inability may be 
stated in the familiar phrase : " It is impossible for God to lie." 
The intellectual may be represented either under the category 
of thought : It is impossible for God to conceive the false as 
if it were the true ; or under the category of knowledge : It is 
impossible for God to know things that are not as if they 
were real things. The physical impossibility may be ex- 
pressed in various forms : It is not open even to God to 
make a part equal to the whole ; to make the same thing 
both be and not be ; to make a circle at once a circle and a 
square, or to make a square out of two straight lines. Or, to 
express the same inability in a different form, we may say : 
God could not make another God infinite like Himself, for 
two infinities could not co-exist ; nor could He create a being 
who should start as if he had a long experience behind him 
or an acquired character within him. He could only make a 
being capable of gaining experience and realizing character. 
The power of making monstrosities is not divine, and God, 
even where most god-like, will be conditioned by the very 
terms of the work He seeks to do. As the most rational 



154 WHETHER GOD BE UNCONDITIONED 

and the most moral of beings, all His acts will be reasonable 
and all His ends moral. 

ii. But the internal conditions are even more determinative 
of the scope, the quality, and the purpose of the Divine 
action than the external. Omnipotence is not the synonym 
of God ; if He is perfect, He must not be conceived simply 
under the category of an Almighty Will. If He be conceived 
simply as substance, or as a mere Ens Infinitum, then we 
may, with Spinoza, reduce His attributes to two — extension, 
which denotes His behaviour in space, and thought, which 
describes His action in time ; or if we conceive Him, with 
Schopenhauer, purely as unconscious Will, then we may ex- 
press His activity in terms which have no more rational value 
or moral significance than matter, motion, and force. But if 
we conceive God as a Subject, i.e. as a conscious centre of 
thought and volition, then, in the very degree that we think of 
Him as infinite, we must interpret His attributes and action 
under the categories of moral reason and ethical will. And 
this means that in our conception of God the qualities of will 
and potency are secondary and determined, the qualities of 
goodness and truth are primary and determinative. The 
Deity is not divine to us because He is almighty, — for an 
omnipotent devil could never be the god of any moral 
being ; but because we conceive Him as the impersonated 
ideal of the Absolute Good. And this signifies that we re- 
gard the external attributes, i.e. those which are physical and 
pertain to the maintenance of physical relations and the 
exercise of physical energies, as less divine than those that 
denote ethical qualities, and the exercise of spiritual and 
intellectual power. Wisdom is more and greater than 
omniscience ; righteousness is more and higher than omni- 
presence ; love is vaster and diviner than omnipotence. Now 
we can only conceive an absolutely Perfect Being as one 
whose whole nature is harmonious in all its actions and ac- 
tivities ; for might without love were mere violence ; presence 



HIS MIGHT SERVES HIS LOVE 155 

without righteousness were only energy ; omniscience with- 
out wisdom were but intellectual perception, — the reflection 
of things in a mirror which had the quality of being con- 
scious of the things it reflected. But if we so conceive the 
Divine Perfection, then all the physical attributes will be 
under the control of the ethical, and must be conceived as 
only means, while the others denote sovereign motives and 
ends. Power may forbear to do many things possible to it 
as power, because they would be alien to love ; and the 
forbearance would not argue defective but effective will, not 
imperfect but perfect might, because exercised in obedience 
to qualities and for ends higher than any which could belong 
to it simply as power. 

Now, the moral of the argument is this : if we conceive 
God as thus conditioned in His action, we shall not ask of 
His might what would be alien to His love, nor of His 
presence what would be opposed to His righteousness, nor 
of His knowledge what would be contrary to His wisdom. 
In other words, we shall think of God, not under the category 
of energy, but as a Being of such absolute perfection that 
He governs all His attributes and is governed by none. 

2. But corresponding to the conditions which affect the 
action of the Creator, are those which define the character 
and status of the creature. 

i. Leibnitz's notion of metaphysical evil expresses the 
most obvious of truisms. No created being can possess the 
attributes or the beatitude of the Creator, or have His outlook 
on life. To begin to be, is to be possessed of being without 
the experience needed for its control ; and no measure of 
seclusion, as in some imagined paradise, or supersession of 
responsibility for personal conduct, could ever teach the man 
how to rule himself. To be a new created being is to be 
nothing more than a potentiality ; and it is as such, a being 
compounded of infinite capabilities, that man is of transcen- 
dent worth for his Creator, and of incalculable value to His 



156 CREATURE REFLECTS THE CREATOR 

moral system. The primitive state of innocence represents 
the inexperience of the man just arrived on the scene. He 
is not good, he is not evil ; he is simply in a negative or 
privative state ; what he is to be must wait on his earliest 
experiments in living. 

ii. What is less obvious than the necessity of metaphysical 
evil, but is more important for the question at issue, is the 
relation of the Divine Perfections to the character, quality, 
and rank of the created being. We can only conceive God 
as moved to create by ends determined by His own nature ; 
for as His character is in an infinite degree nobler and more 
generous than the aggregated nobility and generosity of the 
created universe, it follows that the only ends capable of 
satisfying Him must, in order to be worthy of Him, be found 
in Himself. If, then, He is moved to create by an end that 
may be described, on the divine side, as His own glory, its 
correlate will be, of course, on the created side, the creature's 
good. And this will be, alike as regards intensity and 
extension, a more pre-eminent good than could have been 
conceived or attempted had the good been accommodated 
and proportioned to the creature's deserts. But the good-will 
of the Creator, while in itself a will of absolute good, must 
be, in action, conditioned by two things, (a) the capacity, and 
(/3) the capability of the Created. 

(a) Now, the only capacity capable of moral good must 
itself be moral ; love in the strict sense can only be where 
love has been or may be reciprocated. Things may be 
admired or praised, and they may even excite wonder, but 
they cannot evoke love. The very admiration they awaken 
is not for themselves, but for their author. Art means 
creation, a mind and hand behind the thing admired ; and it 
is the mind in the thing we praise, not merely the thing in 
itself. But the only kind of creature that could satisfy a 
Being of absolute goodness would be a creature capable of 
the highest form of good, the being loved by the Best, and 



GOD SEES HIMSELF IN MAN 157 

therefore able to love the Best in return. Now, these distinc- 
tions will help us to determine what qualities will make the 
creature acceptable to a moral Creator. It would be the 
unworthiest of all possible conceptions to imagine God as 
a mere infinite Mechanic or Artist creating a system simply 
for Himself to admire, a marvellous mechanism, cunningly 
contrived like the watch of our familiar apologetic ; or like 
the engine strongly built and well stored with fuel imagined 
by the deists ; or a picture skilfully painted and proportioned 
which should show the most wonderful blending of colours ; 
or an oratorio which should exhibit the most unexpected and 
sublime mingling of harmonies. In our serious and thought- 
ful moods we confess to ourselves that a God who passed 
His eternities only in the contemplation of His own work- 
manship would not seem to us worthy of the only worship fit 
for the Deity. If this be true, it signifies that Creation, to be 
agreeable to Him, must be of creatures like Him ; spirit as 
He is Spirit, intellect as He is Intelligence, love as He is Love. 
(/?) But this involves the second and correlative quality in 
the creature — capability, freedom, the power to give or to 
withhold, to welcome or to cast out, to obey or to refuse 
obedience. The capacity for God is not' mere physical 
space, but moral capability ; and moral capability has two 
attributes — freedom or spontaneity, and educability or the 
faculty of continuous amelioration. When the freedom is 
ordered, moral growth will follow ; where the will obeys, 
there the nature attains progressive enlargement, which can 
only mean that the more capability widens moral capacity, 
the more pleasure God will have in the creature, in the 
increased room made to receive the gifts which He loves to 
pour into the soul that craves His presence. Moral freedom, 
therefore, must belong to the only creature capable of being 
regarded with complacency by the Creator. If we could 
conceive a universe of automata, or of reasons purely 
mechanical, which would be as if nature had become the 



158 THE CREATOR NOT A MECHANIC 

storehouse for an infinite multitude of logical machines, 
what would they be but a universe of mere contrivances, the 
diversions of a curious mechanic, no creatures of a moral 
Creator? If, further, we were to imagine a universe of such 
automata equally responsive to impact from some moving 
body without and to logical processes started from within, but 
absolutely without power to vary either the logical formulae 
or the direction in which the external impact would drive 
them ; and were we then to ask, whether they would be able 
to satisfy the soul of their Maker, what could the answer be 
but this ? Were He only an architect, a skilled builder, or a 
cunning maker of watches, which once adjusted and wound 
up could go on for ages, He might be satisfied with a 
universe of this sort ; but if He were so easily satisfied, then 
the very depth of His satisfaction would be the measure of 
His imperfection, for it would argue Him void of those moral 
qualities which we conceive most essential to goodness. 

We may say, therefore, that the external and internal con- 
ditions which qualify the divine actions, and the attributes 
that determine the divine character, must have something 
correspondent in the capability, the quality, and the status of 
the creature ; i.e. the more morally perfect we conceive God 
to be, the more must we conceive Him incapable of satisfac- 
tion from any save moral creatures. And they are creatures 
who must make their own experience, form their own char- 
acters, govern their own conduct, — in a sense, determine 
their own destiny. If God were, on some critical occasion, 
by direct action or interference, to supersede the choice of 
the will or the tendency of the heart, then He would, in the 
same degree, undo His own creation, annihilate or abolish 
its moral and responsible being. We come, therefore, to the 
conclusion that the only creation worthy of a personal God 
is a universe of persons ; and persons born as potentialities 
who can be educated by experience, awakened to reason, 
won to love, and persuaded to obedience. 



IMMUTABILITY NOT IMMOBILITY 159 

§ VI. The Permission of Moral Evil and the Deity 

1. Now it is evident, from the principles which have issued 
from this discussion, that the more we conceive the Creator 
through His moral attributes, the less can we reduce Him, 
by means of physical and logical categories, to a mere 
abstraction ; and as we think of Him at the beginning we 
must think of Him throughout. The immutability of God is 
a fixed and fundamental principle ; but immutability does 
not mean immobility. God is in nature, character, and 
purpose unchangeable ; but in attitude and modes of action 
He is as varied as the infinite needs of changeful man. For 
He could not be invariable in mind and end unless He were 
variable in the use and application of His energies. Hence 
the act and fact of sin, while they could have caused no 
change in the principles which determine His choices and 
ends, may yet have effected a distinct change in the things 
He chose to do or in His mode of doing them. This means 
that the laws of thought and being which had conditioned the 
action of the Creator, did not cease to condition Him when 
providence followed upon creation, and man was apostate 
instead of obedient. But the significance and bearing of 
the principle thus stated will become more apparent in the 
attempt to deal with the question which has so long waited 
for an answer : — How can the permission of the evil that 
has so depraved man be reconciled with the being and 
character of an infinitely good and powerful God ? 

Now, it may be well to note here that " permission " is not 
a very happy word, and may imply consent to the doing of 
an action, though not moral approbation of the action itself. 
But under no form can it be allowed that God consented to 
the introduction of evil. We conceive that He used every 
means short of recalling His own creation to prevent it. 
Let us change the term " permission " for the terms " non- 
prevention of the evil," so as to indicate that there was no 



160 LAW AND FREEDOM CORRELATIVES 

moral consent, only abstention from the use of physical force 
or restraint. But even as thus changed, the question does 
not raise the precise issue, which may be more positively and 
explicitly stated thus — Is the exercise of obedience or the 
cultivation and practice of righteousness compatible with an 
order which the infinitely good and holy and powerful God 
has instituted ? The reply would be instant and emphatic : — 
" Nothing is more certain than this compatibility ; His order 
must exist expressly for the purpose of promoting obedience, 
holiness, happiness." But now let us honestly ask, Could 
there be obedience where disobedience was impossible ? or 
could there be righteousness if wickedness could not be 
done? The person that could not disobey would be quite 
incapable of obeying. If there was no power to do evil, there 
would be no ability to do good. Where the will has no 
alternatives, its choices can have neither merit nor demerit ; 
where only one path lies before the traveller, error may be 
impossible, but so is discovery ; where there is no vice to 
allure, there is no virtue to be won. The very notion of a 
moral nature under a moral law involves, therefore, an order 
that can be broken. Where there is no law that can be 
violated, there may be necessity, there may be a conversion 
of forces, or a phenomenal sequence of events, but nothing 
which can be termed law. We use a metaphor when we 
speak of the law of gravitation ; for it knows neither precept 
nor sanction, but only describes a mode in which things are 
observed to behave. Where no transgression can be, there 
is no law, and it is impossible to predicate obedience or 
disobedience of a planet, a river, or a stone. But the very 
essence of the law which rules man is that it can be obeyed 
or disobeyed ; both obedience and disobedience must be 
possible, or both impossible. Hence if a universe is to be 
created where moral good shall be, it must also be a universe 
where moral evil may exist. The essential quality of moral 
law is repeated in the essential character of the moral being. 



INVOLVE POSSIBILITY OF EVIL 161 

If such a being were necessitated, he could be neither moral 
nor under moral law ; he could be neither holy nor wicked, 
but he would remain simply as he was made — without 
character and without will. 

If, then, it was good to have moral beings under moral 
law, evil must be possible. Even God could not, however 
much He might will it, cause it to be otherwise. Things 
that cannot be conceived or related in thought are in the 
region of realities impossible things ; and so as His reason 
and ours are akin, the things ours will not think His cannot 
achieve. It is, therefore, no more derogatory to the majesty 
of God to say that He could not create a moral being 
without the power of choice than to say that He could not 
make another infinite, or cause a being who began to be at 
a definite moment to have all the experience of one who 
had been from eternity. If, then, a moral must be a free 
creature, with the faculty and opportunity of choice, a new 
question arises : Was it good that God should make moral 
beings ? That question has been by anticipation answered. 
If it was good for God to create those who could share His 
own beatitude, He could do so only on the condition that 
He made them capable of rejecting that for which they were 
designed. And who will say that he would apply another 
law to the universe and its Author than he would apply 
to himself? There is no man with an honourable manhood 
within him who is not enlarged and ennobled by both the 
idea and the fact of fatherhood ; but every man who wills 
to become a father faces the problem which God faced 
when He made the universe. In the home and in the family 
the father is disciplined by the child as much as the child 
is disciplined by the father, but to the father belongs the 
responsibility for the child's being ; and on him lie duties of 
self-restraint, of providence, of the daily concern to make all 
things that happen bear upon the formation of the higher 
moral qualities in his child. May we not say, then, that what 

P.C.R. IT 



S \ 



t62 INTERFERENCE NO REMEDY 

justifies the responsibilities man dares to undertake when he 
becomes a parent, justifies God in making a universe which 
shall be the home of reason, vocal with the harmonies of 
love and the dissonances of life? And we may be certain 
that the evil we now feel is to us more darkly real, and 
more nearly coincident, if not indeed identical, with the 
realm of being than it is to Him who sees the end from the 
beginning and each fraction in its relation to the whole. 

2. But at this point a question we have long foreseen and 
anticipated may be asked : — Could not God, when man's will 
inclined to evil, have intervened and changed its inclination 
or even prevented its choice ? But intervention would have 
been destruction. A will suspended in its choice were a 
will destroyed. It would only be a masked form of annihila- 
tion for God to give a will and then to withdraw it, leaving 
the man standing before his alternative choices a will-less 
automaton. Only on the supposition that God were double- 
minded, and so unstable in all His ways, would it be pos- 
sible to believe that, having first created man as a being 
capable of acquiring experience, He, in fear of his acquiring 
it as a man rather than as a god, went back on Himself, 
uncreated His own creature, and refused to leave him to act 
and to learn by action as He had meant him to do. But, 
it may be urged, the change or intervention could have 
come at an earlier point. When the vision of God ranged 
through all the infinite multitudes of possible worlds, He 
must have foreseen what would happen in the ideal He 
actually selected for realization. And when He foresaw evil, 
could He not have arrested His purpose, or have. stayed His 
creative hand ? But who then would have been victor ? — 
God who turned aside from His purpose because of possible 
evil, or the possible evil that caused God to turn aside ? 
The scheme that involved no difficulty were not worth 
realizing ; the Creator who because of difficulties abandoned 
His plan could surely not be reckoned as either courageous 



EVIL IS: WHY IT CONTINUES 163 

or wise. The anthropomorphic language dismays and even 
revolts me, but, in the absence of a more perfect medium, it 
must be used in the question which concludes this section : — 
Was it not better that Deity, instead of turning aside because 
of evil, should go on, create the existence where evil was to 
be, and then deal directly with the evil when it had become ? 

§ VII. Why Evil has been Allowed to Continue 

I. The question which has just been put brings us to the 
next stage in our discussion : the continuance of evil. And 
here we begin by simply formulating the principle : it is 
impossible to conceive the good and holy God as ever con- 
ceding to evil the right to be ; for by its very idea it is a 
denial of His sovereignty and a challenge of His claim to be 
the First and the Last and the All in all. And this principle 
enables us to place physical and moral evil in their true 
reciprocal relations as integral parts of a single system, 
elements in what we may call the method of the divine 
government. For though the two evils are different in fact 
and distinct in thought, yet unless physical evil have a moral 
reason and function, it can have no justifiable existence in a 
moral universe. While, then, we conceive moral evil as man's 
act, we conceive physical evil, so far as it has its roots in the 
nature of man and springs out of the organic relations or 
social and historical constitution of the race, as belonging to 
the consequences which the order established of the Creator 
has caused to follow upon the act. I do not like to use 
juridical terms of God and His relations to man, but there 
are occasions when they are the only terms that can be used. 
If, then, such terms may be used here, we might say that Law 
is implied in the ideas of both moral and physical evil, but 
in the two cases Law is used with a totally different both 
extension and connotation : in the one case, it is Law as 
preceptive and prohibitive which is broken in respect of what 
it enjoins or forbids ; in the other case, it is Law with its 



164 LAW AND SANCTION A UNITY 

retributory sanctions, enforced and punitive, that is active. 
The precept may be wholly moral, but the sanction, whether 
held to be penal, disciplinary, incidental, or vindicative, must 
be largely physical. Law as it forbids man to steal, or to bear 
false witness, or to commit murder, is a precept enjoined by 
the lawgiver, perceived by the reason, and fulfilled or broken 
by the man's own choice ; but law as it punishes the man 
who has stolen, or borne false witness, or committed murder, 
is a sanction enforced by a power which need not depend on 
the approval of the man's reason or the consent of his will. 
Now, this means that the law which appears to us twofold, — as 
moral, a precept we can obey, a command we can resist, and, 
as physical, a penalty or a consequence we must suffer, may 
appear as a unity, i.e. as a law wholly moral, to the Creator, 
who must see and read our complex life in its context, 
with the physical penetrating the moral, the moral affecting 
the physical, both reciprocally active and inter-dependent. 
Hence the distinction that is so obvious to us may have no 
being for God. Where the moral attributes are sovereign the 
view of the universe will be imperatively moral ; and so what 
we regard as physical suffering may seem to Him, who sees 
the whole as a whole, altogether ethical in function and in 
value. This variety of aspect is not unknown even to our- 
selves ; our laws, whether civil or criminal, are many-sided, 
and the face they turn to different sections of the community 
is never quite the same. The legislature will see the law 
which it makes as a whole or a unity, though probably the 
emphasis in its mind will lie on the end to which the law 
is a means ; the judge who has to administer the law will 
read it with the emphasis thrown on the sanction by which 
order has to be vindicated and justice maintained ; the law- 
breaker who has to suffer at its hands sees in it a penal 
instrument, and feels it as a physical force ; while the body 
of the citizens feel only that they may dwell serenely and 
securely under its protection. So we who suffer may dis- 



AND MAN TO GOD IS A WHOLE 165 

tinguish our physical pains from our moral deserts, while He 
who made the physical for the moral may steadily see the 
means through the end and in it, both alike moral and alike 
good. 

But this principle involves another, which is its correlative 
or counterpart. For what is true of the law must also be 
true of those who are under it, i.e. while its subjects are to 
us single persons they may appear to the Creator as a unity, 
co-ordinated as a collective mind, or incorporated in the 
organism of nature and the race. In other words, man is to 
God a whole, a colossal individual, whose days are centuries, 
whose organs are races, whose being as corporate endures 
immortal amid the immortality of its constituent units ; and 
this unity has at once an ethical and a physical character. 
Hence there must be a divine judgment of the race as a race, 
as well as of the individual man as an individual ; and the 
severer the judgment on the race the more leniently will 
the individual be judged. For while the race may cause 
suffering, it is the individual alone who can suffer ; and the 
measure in which his sufferings are just can be determined 
only after the responsibility has been equitably proportioned 
between himself and the race. It was this idea which in the 
older theology made the doctrine of original sin so cognate 
to the doctrine of grace, while here it shows the need of a 
standard too absolute to allow justice to be lost in pity or 
pity to be sacrificed to justice. For evil is by its very nature 
personal, but law is by its nature universal, and it is through 
the universal that the personal must be judged. And this 
limits and defines both the responsibility of the individual 
and the province or function of law. On the one hand, he 
stands at once above and within nature and the race, above 
them as a distinct person, within them as an inseparable unit 
and integral part, giving to both, receiving from both, and 
amenable to the law according to the measure or the merit of 
his giving and getting. On the other hand, his mind or will 



166 TIME NOT A STATE OF PROBATION, 

may choose to do evil, or augment the evil he has suffered 
from nature and the race. And it is here where the law 
enters, as ideal or preceptive to determine his merit, as dis- 
ciplinary or vindicative to apportion the penal consequences 
which will best suit his case and express his deserts. And as 
the choice is the act of the man as a whole, so the con- 
sequences must affect the whole of him, natural or corporeal 
as well as spiritual. 

2. On grounds and for reasons such as these we argue, then, 
that, however moral and physical evil or moral and physical 
law may appear to us, they stand organically related in the 
mind of Him who made and who governs nature and man. 
And it is this organic connexion of the two laws and the 
two evils (which, it ought to be observed, is a very different 
thing from their identity) that makes it possible to vindicate 
both the justice and the goodness of God in the face of 
continued moral evil and universal physical suffering. Were 
there no suffering, moral evil would live a sort of unchallenged 
and authorized life ; were suffering an end in itself, it would 
imply the ferocity of him who either allowed it to be, or 
himself inflicted it. Were it even only penal, it would signify 
his injustice, his failure to discriminate between sinners not 
simply by causing all to suffer, but by often dealing more 
severely with the innocent than with the guilty. While, 
then, the connexion is positive, it may be termed disciplinary 
■or educative rather than punitive or retributory ; i.e. the 
purpose of physical evil is not so much to uphold law or 
vindicate justice as to change and instruct man and form 
•character. The older apologetic used to argue from the 
existence of suffering that this was a state of probation. 
Both the idea and the phrase were borrowed from Deism, 
and were alien to Christian theology. To it this was not a 
state of probation, but a fallen state, within which redeeming 
grace was active. God was conceived not as trying men, but 
as seeking to save them ; and this idea represented a higher 



BUT OF RECOVERY FROM LAPSE 167 

and more generous belief. Physical evil may be coincident 
with moral, the sign of a fallen state ; but it signifies that the 
state is not final, that the man is recoverable, that ameliorative 
forces work around him and within him, detaching him from 
evil, attracting him to good, showing him in the mirror now 
of his heart, now of his imagination, now of his social or 
domestic experience, the miseries that follow from a lustful 
will, what calamities lurk in want of thought, how ages of 
poisoned existence may flow from the brief indulgence of 
vicious selfishness. The most remarkable thing in suffering 
is not its extent or duration, its intensity or immensity, but 
its educative, regenerative, and propulsive force, its power 
to make man conscious of his enormous responsibilities and 
to awaken in him the desire to fulfil them. So conceived, 
physical evil may be described as a divine energy for moral- 
izing man and nature. This is, if not its main function, yet 
its chief result. It has been the motive of all our beneficences, 
though their source has been the heavenly Grace. 

But the argument which has defined the action and the 
function of physical evil has vindicated the goodness of God 
in maintaining the conditions which allow moral evil still to 
continue to be. It continues to exist not as a rightful or 
permanent inhabitant of the universe, but as one whose very 
right to be is denied, and for whose expulsion all the energies 
of nature have been marshalled and trained to fight. An 
this is, as we conceive the matter, the only conduct which 
would have become the Deity ; certainly we could not con- 
ceive the annihilation of the creature to be seemly to His 
majesty, or withdrawal from all care or concern for him to 
be congenial to His grace. On the contrary, if we may so 
express ourselves, evil was the mute but potent appeal of the 
creation to the Creator not to forsake the work of His hands ; 
and was it not an appeal His own very honour bound Him 
to regard ? 

In this chapter we have laboured to keep our thought 



1 68 THE LAST WORD NOT NATURE'S 

strictly within the lines of a natural and rational theology, 
but the point whither the argument has been tending is clear : 
Nature cannot here speak the last word ; we must wait the 
revelation of the Son of God. To allow evil to become and 
to continue without any purpose of redemption — i.e. to leave 
it as an ultimate fact and the final state of created existence 
— were to us an absolutely inconceivable act in a good and 
holy and gracious God. And so we may conclude this chapter 
with two questions : (a) May not the existence of evil explain 
and justify the event which we call the Incarnation ? and (/3) 
How can we conceive the justice and the goodness of God in 
relation to evil if His continued and final action towards it 
be excluded from consideration ? 



CHAPTER V 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 

THE positions we have reached may be described as too 
purely abstract to be of any scientific significance; but 
if so, they will not be correctly described. For, in attempt- 
ing to discuss the principles which are involved in the inter- 
pretation of the concrete, we have been helped to a more 
definite idea of the concrete itself, (a) We have come face 
to face, not with a nature which is but an aggregate of 
chemical elements and physical energies, or a mere suc- 
cession of living forms that are ever struggling to live, yet 
ever succumbing to death ; but with a nature which is veiled 
spirit, which speaks of mind to mind, and which, as an 
intelligible order, is a medium of intercourse between the 
Intelligence it embodies and the intellect by which it is 
studied. (/3) And Man completes the lesson of Nature. He 
is not a mere fortuitous aggregation of atoms or an organism 
made by his environment, whether conceived as nature or as 
circumstances, but a person who embodies a moral law so 
imperative in its terms as to imply that the universe in which 
he lives is also moral. (7) And the life he lives corresponds 
alike to the nature which enfolds him and to the nature which 
he realizes. It is not the life of a mere physical being or 
animal automaton, but of a moral person, standing within 
nature, yet rising above it, gifted with freedom, yet without 
either the knowledge or the experience that could at once 
use it for ends becoming the ideal of his personality ; with 
the eternal law written on his heart, yet with fleshly passions 
or inherited tendencies or defects of temper that obliterate 

the law or bewilder him who would read it. And so there 

169 



170 MAN DENOTES THE RACE 

arises in his nature a conflict which is only too well expressed 
in the contradictions of his conduct. But out of his strug- 
gles with himself and his environment, with his habits and 
his conscience, with the nature around him, the law within 
him, and the God above him, come sufferings that educate 
and ennoble. From life he so learns to know evil and good, 
sorrow and happiness, that it may well be described as a 
discipline for immortality. 

But we must now pass from what some may still conceive 
to be the region of abstract metaphysics to the very concrete 
region of the history which shows man living his common 
and collective life. Now, it is not my purpose either to 
sketch this history, which could be done here only in an 
outline too shadowy to have any significance, or to expound 
a philosophy of its course, its stages, and its goal, but simply 
to indicate what may be regarded as some of the principles 
needed for its interpretation and to state one of the great 
problems it raises. This chapter is, indeed, but transitional ; 
it is meant to connect the discussion of fundamental questions 
in religious thought with a discussion concerning historical 
religion. 

§ I. The Significance of History 

I. The point where the new discussion joins hands with 
the old is here : the man who is at once the interpreter and 
the interpretation of nature, who is embodied reason and 
incorporated law, and who looks at the perplexities of life 
with an eye suffused and dim from the troubles of his own 
soul, is not a particular but a typical person. What we con- 
ceive to be his mind does not mean the psychology of this 
child or that individual, the philosophy of a school or a period, 
but the mind of generic Man ; and so man here denotes a 
Race with a history behind it which helps to explain the 
mind that is within it. And this history, construed as man's 
articulated mind, signifies that the science of nature without 



HISTORY HIS ARTICULATED MIND 171 

the science of history is an incomplete and an indeciphera- 
ble fragment. 

Now we have already argued that nature and man are so 
related that it must be read through him and he be read into 
it if it is ever to be more than a mass of unintelligibilities. 
Without him it would be as unfinished as a literary fragment 
which never got beyond the preamble to the story, and which, 
indeed, knew nothing of any plot, and less than nothing of 
any denouement. But the parallel goes much farther than 
this, and means that the creative process whose beginnings 
can be traced in nature is continued in man ; that his acts 
and achievements, the states and customs, the laws and 
literatures, the arts and sciences, the philosophies he has 
elaborated and the religions he has believed, are as real 
things and as integral parts of the universe as any of the 
forces, elements, or organisms which physical science is 
accustomed to think it handles ; that the tendency to educe 
higher from lower forms reigns in human as well as in natu- 
ral history, and was, indeed, seen in the former long before it 
obtained recognition in the latter ; and that the true method 
of interpretation is to proceed from man to nature, for the 
highest holds and knows the secret of the lowest, while the 
lowest neither holds nor knows the secret of the highest. If, 
then, the history of man be the continuation of the record of 
creation, it follows that the creative energy has not ceased to 
operate, and that its character, qualities, tendencies, modes 
of working and relation to the forms developed, can be bet- 
ter studied here than in the field of nature. This position is 
fundamental to our argument, and follows from the parallel 
between the immanence of God in nature and in man. He 
dwells in both and He works through both, though always in 
methods agreeable to the medium employed. What is energy 
in nature is reason and will in man, but they are no less ours 
that they are inspired by Him, and no less His that they 
appear in us as conscious and voluntary activities. These 



172 THE GROWTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS 

may seem but cryptic utterances ; we must try to make them 
more intelligible and lucid. 

2. The experience of the individual has an instructive 
counterpart in the life of the race. The significance of his 
own history dawned but slowly upon the mind of man. It 
is a curious but certain fact, with something much more than 
a psychological interest, that Nature was at first a much more 
urgent problem to him than he was to himself. His earliest 
and most urgent intellectual need was to adjust himself to 
his environment, to make out the meaning of the world he 
lived in, the objects he handled, the food he lived on, the 
river that flowed past his cave, the sun that shone by day, 
the moon that walked in beauty by night, the stars that came 
out of the darkness and hid themselves at the breaking of 
the dawn, the powers that worked him good or ill, the birth 
in which his life began, and the death in which it ended. He 
could not but puzzle himself about these things. What did. 
they mean ? who had caused them ? and whence had they 
come ? what did he himself mean ? why were the scenes 
around him and he so short a time together ? what had 
been before him ? and what would be after him ? These 
were the questions his curious intellect asked of itself and 
of Nature, refusing to be satisfied without some more or less 
rational response, and this' in time worked itself here into a 
science, and there into a philosophy, now into some act of 
worship, and again into an article of religious faith. But in 
the long and slow course of development man became a 
greater problem to himself than ever Nature had been to 
him, though he did not even then discover that his problem 
involved a vaster and more colossal Man than was contained 
within his own personality. For the human individual is no 
atom, without a history and without a name. He begins to 
be generations before he is born ; then he is born into a 
family, he resumes the family he is born into, and is the 
sum of all his ancestors. The family dwelt in a village 



ITS PROBLEMS, PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE 173 

which lived in a state ; the family epitomized the village, 
and the village epitomized the state, while the state em- 
bosomed the village and the village absorbed the family and 
the family the individual. The state, in its turn, was sub- 
sumed under a people, was heir to all its acquired qualities, 
the organ of its peculiar genius, a form under which that 
genius lived, and through which it accomplished its work. 
The people, again, was a member of a still wider organism, 
belonged to a given species, a white or black, a tawny or yel- 
low race, speaking a given kind of language, nasal or gut- 
tural, monosyllabic or polysyllabic, inflexional or syntactical, 
or both. And, finally, the species was absorbed in the 
genus ; individuals, families, states, and kinds were compre- 
hended under the generic Man, the collective Race, the sum 
total of Humanity. What then was Humanity ? How were 
its parts related ? Had it any reason, any end ? Whence 
had it come, and whither was it going ? Had it a common 
life, or was life an attribute only of the units composing it ? 
How were the periods of its history connected, and what was 
the value of its several ages — ancient, middle, modern — for 
each other and for the whole ? And without any solution of 
these questions could man, even as a solitary individual, be 
said to be explained ? 

3. But these questions were for long the problems and 
speculations of an elect few ; even now they are to the vast 
majority of mankind unknown and inconceivable. For they 
become of intellectual interest and urgency only when cer- 
tain ideas emerge which bind the unit consciously to man- 
kind. These ideas may be represented by the terms : — the 
unity, the continuity, and the community of human life, 
order and purpose in human history. Man had to be con- 
ceived in all his families, races, states, and times, as even 
more a unity than the nature which enfolded him, while his 
unity included a variety unknown to nature. For this unity 
was not a mere term of co-ordination, but denoted continuous 



i 7 4 UNITY NOT A WELCOME IDEA 

being, a race immortal through the mortality of its units, and 
with a life which every moment grew out of the life that was 
or that had been. And the life as continuous was common, 
possessed by all, shared by each, communicated and com- 
municable through the reciprocity of the unit with the whole,, 
and the whole with the unit. And so this unity involved an 
order pervading all the tumults of men, harmonizing all their 
dissonances, and making at once their storms and calms, 
their alliances and their enmities, their jealousies and friend- 
ships, the horrors of their wars and the victories of their 
peace, work out the end towards which Humanity, as a mass, 
moved by its units, ever tended and struggled. 

But these ideas, though native to what may be termed the 
ideal in man, were unwelcome to much that was actual in 
him. They represent the supernatural rather than the natu- 
ral elements in his life ; and, odd as it may seem, man's ear 
has ever been quicker to hear external sounds than the inner 
voice. And these were not ideas that rose unbidden, demand ■ 
ing entertainment and refusing to be dismissed ; but guests 
to whose entreaties the natural mind and passions of man 
could offer a stout resistance. For the very conditions that 
made Nature speak to man, turned man himself dumb. Thus 
the idea of unity has proved to be an offence to what we may 
term the natural human mind in all the stages of its culture. 
Savage man was proud of his family and his tribe ; other 
families were there to be robbed, other tribes were there to 
be slain ; what he cared for was not to know his kinship 
with them, but his differences from them, alike as regards 
origin, fortunes, and destiny. And this pride of race or blood 
was even more a note of civilized than of savage man ; and, 
strange to say, drew its inspiration from causes that ought 
to have been its death. Thus his culture made the Greek 
scornful of the barbarian, his religion made the Jew insolent 
to the Gentile, his law made the Roman citizen jealous of the 
provincial. And this is not an individual, it is an even 



WHAT IT SIGNIFIES 175 

intenser political and social feeling. For what are states in 
their relation to each other but embodiments of that indus- 
trial jealousy and exclusive pride which has made so many 
of them like colossal personalities inspired by greed, ambi- 
tious for conquest, full of the lust of battle with feebler tribes 
and peoples, ready to find fame and even happiness in annex- 
ing the wealth of those they subdued, and to use the very 
strength of the vanquished as if it were their own ? It was 
therefore not by any easy process of Nature, but by a high 
and supernatural grace, that the unity of man became first a 
possible, then a tolerable, and finally a victorious idea. 

§ II. The Ideas of Unity and Order in History 

1. But what does unity as here applied mean ? The idea 
is so complex, and contains so many and so varied elements, 
that it may well break while being stretched wide enough to 
comprehend them all. The term does not denote unity of 
origin either as regards time or place or mode ; but it does 
denote unity of source or cause, the equal and cognate re- 
lation of all to the one Creator who is the common Father 
of men. It also expresses unity of nature, a oneness of spirit 
or of reason, which shows itself in all minds being subject to 
the same laws and conditions of thinking, and which makes 
thought simply as thought intelligible to every mind, and 
every mind capable of knowing and being known to every 
other. The metaphysical idea of unity differs from the 
physical, for the conscious unit who lives within the organic 
unity called the human race is divided, as by the whole 
diameter of being, from the unconscious atom which is a 
convertible moment in a physical universe it can neither 
know nor be known to. It, further, connotes sameness of 
value, not adventitious, but essential, not as actual or realized, 
but as real and realizable ; and makes the savage the equal 
of the sage, not in extrinsic and attained, but in intrinsic and 
potential worth. The substantive thus becomes an ethical 



176 UNITY AN IMMANENT TELEOLOGY 

unity, for the most refined has duties to the coarsest ; the 
man who leads the van has in his keeping the life of him 
who brings up the last rear guard. It is therefore a unity 
which has nothing to do with the accidents of existence ; 
indeed it finds in these — the differences of colour, climate, 
custom, language, laws, religions — the supreme hindrances 
to its outward realization ; and so it tends to grow into a 
unity of interests, a communion of responsibilities, a law of 
solidarity which makes the good of any a common good, and 
the injury of one a harm to all. As in physics the unity 
of energy is expressed in the correlation and convertibility of 
forces, so the unity of man is authenticated by the capability 
of men to become each like to the other. And if we seek a 
name for the common essence or character which constitutes 
this unity, what better one need we desire than Humanity, 
a name which so felicitously combines the ethnical and the 
ethical, the real and the ideal elements in the conception ? 
For the term expresses a process as well as a fact, since 
wherever unity is believed, unification begins ; and attempts 
are made to realize the dream of the one humanity which is 
yet to stand up and build upon the earth the city of God. 

2. Out of this unity, with its correlative community and 
continuity of life, comes what we may describe as the im- 
manent teleology which makes man's progress in civilization 
a progressive realization of reason, the incorporation in the 
societies and states he creates of the qualities intellectual, 
ethical, aesthetic, and religious by virtue of which he is man. 
If his customs and institutions, languages and religions, arts 
and literatures, stages and degrees of civilization be studied 
in themselves, they will appear to present an infinite variety ; 
but if they be looked at in relation to the mind which has 
been their source, it will be seen that there have been at 
work certain uniform causes which express a certain unity in 
the causal nature. For it could only be in obedience to 
some immanent tendencies or laws of being, though educed 



CIVILIZATION ITS EMBODIMENT 177 

and exercised by external needs, that men have everywhere 
grouped themselves into families, families have formed them- 
selves into tribes, tribes have aggregated into nations, and 
nations expanded and consolidated into states. It is due to 
no accident that in every community systems of legislation 
have arisen whose affinities can be explained only by factors 
of origin which are common in nature and invariable in 
action, though their difference simply the dissimilarity of the 
conditions, outer and inner, under which each community has 
lived and tried to order its life. Industries, too, and arts have 
risen and grown as if they were spontaneous things, though 
they are products of will and creations of reason, affected 
indeed by climate and geographical situation, but determined 
as regards being by the character and quality of the race. 
Commerce and exchange, economic states and conditions, 
may also be brought under the categories of law and reason; 
and so represent the operation in human nature of common 
and stable factors. Literature is as universal in its being as 
it is varied in its forms, existing here as the rude or savage 
story, there as the classic poem or elaborate romance ; but 
wherever or whatever it may be, it embodies the ideas by 
which some people lived and were moved. Religion is the 
greatest and most distinctive of all the creations of the 
human spirit, in form the most infinitely diversified, but in 
substance, in ultimate ideal constituents, the most invariable. 
The essential unity of these products of the reason, and, 
consequently, of the reason which has created them, is seen 
in their communicability, their being in the most perfect 
degree exchangeable and transmissible things. Nation can 
borrow from nation ; the later is the heir of the earlier age. 
And so no state creates a good for itself alone, and no empire 
can do an evil that is not an injury to the race. The life of 
humanity is one, and its goods are common. The uniform- 
ities of Nature have their counterpart, and, as it were, intel- 
lectual equivalent, in the unities of History. 

p.c.r. 12 



178 LAW AMID THE COLLISION OF WILLS 

3. But if unity was a late and hard idea to acquire, order 
was, though for different reasons, still later and harder. For 
what is the conflict of forces, the tempestuous strife of ele- 
ments in Nature, compared to the collision of will and passion 
in man and between men ? " He loved the better, he did 
the worse," represents a fact of collective as of personal 
experience. If a single state, nay, if a single city, be taken 
as a type of man, what can his history seem but the chosen 
arena of wilfulness or lawless accident, the field where an 
infinite multitude of choices, each under the guidance of a 
reason which does not show itself reasonable because bent 
only on petty aims and mean ambitions, meet daily in force- 
ful antagonism ? How is it possible to discover order in 
history when all that can be discovered, if man be studied 
in his actual life, is a mass of colliding units, every unit being 
a centre of force which cannot be changed by expenditure 
into some other mode of existence, because where the soul 
is concerned, the fiercest impact against other souls makes 
each only the more distinctly personal ? The state of war 
in the savage tribe is a state of kindly humanity compared 
with the mass of latent or open violence in the modern city, 
where nothing but the overmastering strength of the law, 
which is sovereign, can hold down the explosive energy 
stored in thousands of sullen and discontented wills. And 
if, when life is studied in the concrete present, we can see 
only this conflict of lawless wills, how, when the whole is 
regarded, can there be any room for the ideas of law, or 
progress, or purpose ? And without these what could history 
seem save a chaos less rational and more disordered than 
that which the ancient imagination conceived as heaving 
tumultuous in the abyss, before the broad-bosomed earth, or 
the starry heaven, or " the golden-tressed sun " rose to call 
out of the confusion a radiant and ordered cosmos ? 

But here the doctrine of the connexion and the continuity 
of Nature and man asserts itself. For if no order or law can 



UNORDERED HISTORY A MINDLESS CHANCE 179 

be found in history, the collective life of man will represent 
only a mindless chance ; and if law be left out of human 
life, can it be conceived to reign in Nature ? And if we con- 
ceive it to reign in the lower, but not in the higher realm, 
what completeness or consistency can there be in our view 
of the universe ? Mind surely cannot stand within an ordered 
Nature with this as its sole distinction — that it is the home 
of all disorderliness. To find physical laws inviolable, and 
then to allow no historical laws to exist, would be to act like 
a man who should find the alphabet significant, but no sig- 
nificance in the literature created by the reason of the phi- 
losopher or the imagination of the poet. And so thinkers 
were driven to seek in history the law and order which 
they had found in Nature, though their search was slower 
and less successful in the one case than it had been in the 
other. It was characteristic that the idea had come to the- 
ology long before it dawned on philosophy, and while as 
yet science had no dream of it or care for it. Men who 
had conceived the Divine Will as the cause of Nature could 
not, with any show of logical consistency, allow that in the 
higher realm of mind God had, by leaving the whole course 
of time to the mercy of an infinity of blind and aimless 
wills, deposed Himself and enthroned Accident. Hence it 
became a necessity to belief to introduce some idea of law in 
history ; and the form under which this was attempted to be 
done was by making the will of God the sole efficient factor 
of movement and change. His was affirmed to be the one 
free will, and He foreordained and executed all things accord- 
ing to His good pleasure. While Freedom reigned in heaven, 
Necessity governed on earth ; and men were but pawns in 
the hands of the Almighty, who moved them whithersoever 
He willed. This was the principle common to theologies 
like those of Augustine and Calvin, and to philosophies like 
those of Spinoza and Leibnitz ; but while it made of God the 
highest reality, it also made illusions of our most real experi- 



180 ZDEA OF ORDER IN HISTORY 

ences, and turned the most invincible of human beliefs — 
the belief of man in his own freedom — into the unveracity 
of a nature which could not choose but lie. Such a theory 
had not, therefore, the secret of continued life within it, 
and died before the emphasis which came to be progressively 
laid on the truth of human nature and the reality of human 
experience. 

But though the idea of order be necessary to the scientific 
views both of nature and of history, yet the order is not in 
the two cases identical in kind and character. The order of 
nature is a rigorous uniformity, but the order of history is 
veiled in an infinite variety. In nature there is a uniform 
energy, incapable of exhaustion by expenditure or of destruc- 
tion by change ; but in history the cause of movement is 
though one yet not uniform, and is so highly and variously 
conditioned as to appear often arbitrary or accidental in 
action rather than simply contingent. In nature the opera- 
tive cause necessitates, but in history there are forces that 
lead as well as forces that drive ; and it is here no paradox 
to say that the power which does not persuade will be unable 
to compel. Indeed, we may affirm that what appears in the 
vicissitudes of states or the careers of persons now as fate 
or necessity, and now as chance or luck, will be found on 
analysis to be beliefs translated into facts by the energy of 
some rational will or wills. And this means that the factors 
of order in history must be stated in the terms of mind 
rather than of matter, i.e. as reasons and motives, as needs 
and desires, as beliefs and aims, rather than as forces, static 
and dynamic. But if mind be the main maker of order in 
history, then its movement will be progressive, the struggle 
of mind to realize itself, to be emancipated from the domin- 
ion of what is not mind ; and, therefore, from the restrictions, 
physical, political, social, which hinder the development of 
its immanent ideal, personal and collective. If order be so 
conceived, then we may define it as the tendency which the 



MIND AS THE MAKER OF ORDER 



181 



reason institutes and governs, but nature and passion now 
condition, now limit, and now impede, towards the realization 
of its idea as reason, i.e. the attainment of the highest free- 
dom, or the right of man to be himself, a free man in a free 
state. 

§ III. The Cause of Order in History 

I. But so to conceive the order is also to determine how its 
cause must be conceived. The cause is mind or reason or 
thought, which, whether it be impersonated in man, embodied 
in nature, or operative in the forces and tendencies which 
govern human affairs, is one in essence, cognate in all its 
forms, and kindred in movement, though varied in manifes- 
tation. What is involved in this statement may be briefly 
thus exhibited. 

i. Man is the vehicle of the order ; through him as mind 
it is realized. This does not mean that he is or has always 
been a being of high or developed intelligence ; but only that 
he must, in however germinal a form, be rational to be man. 
He may be but potential intellect; but whatever he may be, 
the energy which compels all life to grow forces the potential 
to struggle into the actual. In other words, reason must act 
according to its nature ; and its nature is to express and to 
enshrine itself in forms, customs, laws, institutions, which 
reflect it and correspond to the stage of growth, culture, or 
development it has reached. As it is the nature of the normal 
reason so to behave, this behaviour is not the characteristic 
of one person, but of all persons ; their affinities make their 
collective action contributory to a common end, though the 
line along which they act may be indefinitely extended and 
may here and there bend into the most curious and tortuous 
curves. The person is thus, by the very idea of him, a social 
unit, and all his action contributes to modify or develop the 
social unity. 

ii. The man who is reason lives within a rational system 
and in intercourse with it. The intelligible which is with- 



1 82 CONCURRENCE OF NATURE, MAN, GOD, 

out operates upon the intellect which is within, evoking its 
energies and stimulating its thought. The action of nature 
upon mind represents the action not of mere physical forces 
or material qualities upon the senses of some more or less 
passive percipient, but of one reason upon another reason. 
It is a movement in which the subjective reason which is 
man, and the objective Spirit which weaves the appearances 
we see Him by, alike participate. The nature which is visible 
Mind speaks to the man who is embodied spirit. 1 

iii. Nature, though the earliest, is not the sole Intelligible 
which acts upon man ; man is another. The individual is 
impossible without the society, and the longer the race lives 
the more potent grows the power of the past over the pre- 
sent ; persons affect persons, who are, in an ever progressive 
degree, healed, helped, or harmed more by them than by 
Nature. This means that moral forces are cumulative as well 
as regulative. It follows that personalities become factors of 
progress marking man's movement towards civilization ; and 
the philosophy which does not reckon the potent personality 
as a great generative ethical force will never fully and really 
render a rational account of human life. 2 

iv. The race which is conceived to be so constituted does 
not live in isolation from its Source. The forms that struggle 
for life can never be separated from their environment. The 
visible environment of man is twofold, an intelligible nature 
and a rational and a moral society ; but the invisible Environ- 
ment, the common background of both, is the Spirit whose 
thought has been aiming in each and through each at ever 
fuller and more adequate expression. There is nothing so 
inconsequent and hateful as the atheism which finds God in 
nature but not in man, in creation but not in history. If we 
believe that God never ceases to govern, we must conclude 
that His activity will find a large field for its exercise in 
human affairs. And if His will be active there, then it is not 

1 Ante, pp. 35-37. 2 Ante, p. 92. 



MAKES HISTORY CONTINUED CREATION 183 

simply as a directive, but as a creative will, and His peculiar 
creations are the ideas and ideals that most make for freedom 
and righteousness. Of course His action is mediate, but it 
is none the less His that it is through another, by men that 
it may be for man. It is, too, limited by the intelligence and 
conditioned by the freedom of the agent, and has in its 
results all their infinite degrees of capacity and attainment, 
but still He is the impulse that moves, His the fraction of 
truth or equity, perhaps infinitesimal, which their elaborate 
structures have been organized to preserve. 

2. Out of the idea, then, of history as a continued creative 
process due to the continued, though conditioned, activity of 
the original creative Mind rises the problem we desire to 
discuss : — By what method and through what agency have 
the ideas of order and law come into man's life and incor- 
porated themselves first in tribal, then in national, and finally 
in universal forms ? How has it happened that, in spite of 
the strong tendencies in human nature, personal and social, 
to selfish preservation and enlargement of being, there has 
yet been a development of the race towards a wider reason 
and a nobler mind ? The problem, which may be said to be 
common to all modern speculations, philosophical or theo- 
logical, concerning the cause, method, and end of human 
history may be stated in more detail somewhat thus : 

i. The course of human society has been to create an 
order higher than the natural, to substitute an " ethical 
process," governed by altruistic principles, for the "cosmic 
process," where the weakest goes to the wall and the 
strongest survives. The course has not been uniform or 
rapid ; but if we take the foremost peoples as the standard of 
the possibilities in man and in society, then the distance 
covered by them in the movements from the savage to the 
civilized state, is simply immeasurable. 

ii. Among the most potent factors of human development 
there stand certain primary impulses, instincts, or passions 



1 84 NATURE AND PASSION SUBDUED 

which, as representing in the human individual and society 
the same order of facts and forces that create in the lower 
animals the struggle for life, we may call natural. These 
primary passions are apparently most potent in the more 
rudimentary stages of social evolution, where the strong man 
is the sovereign, and the only order obeyed is his will, while 
hunger and greed recognize no moral restraints ; and they 
persist in the aggressive selfishness of individuals and the 
colossal selfishness of classes or States. These passions of 
ungoverned human nature, which is yet feeling after modes 
and principles of government, are, up to a certain point, 
efficient in developing both the personal and the social 
organism ; but when this point is reached, they tend to 
become forces of disintegration and dissolution. For as 
forms of mere force their tendency is to evoke forms of 
countervailing forces, i.e. to beget the private and social 
vices which, as public injuries, first burden and impoverish 
the feeble, and then grow heavier burdens than the strong 
can carry. 

iii. If, then, there is to be rational and moral progress, 
or movement towards a happier and better balanced state 
of being, it must be by some process or power which sub- 
ordinates first the individual and then the whole to some 
higher law than the mere struggle to live, or the hunger that 
will not be denied food, or the passion that only indulgence 
can assuage. This higher law may be described as the 
emergence of an authority that can compel the will of the 
unit to seek the good of the whole, and the will of the whole 
to labour for the good of the unit. 

iv. This authority must, in the ultimate analysis, be ideal, 
i.e. an authority which does not repose on mere strength or 
physical might, but makes its appeal to the reason, and rules 
by governing men from within, by the categorical imperative 
which speaks to the conscience, and by the persuasion which 
constrains the will to seek the better part. The authority 






BY AN IDEAL WHICH IS RELIGION 185 

must be thus ideal in its nature, and ethical in its form, func- 
tion, and scope : for force, whether natural or institutional in 
its origin, whether military, sacerdotal, or regal in its kind, 
can cure no moral ill ; and is in its essence only a primary 
passion become colossal and victorious. 

v. The only ideas capable of subduing man's primary pas- 
sions and aboriginal nature, and creating an order higher 
than they knew, are ideas which are in harmony with the 
ideal he incorporates, and which he has evolved in the course 
of his historical existence. This evolution, though it is a 
natural, is yet not a purely self-determined process, but is 
moved from above as well as from within, by the creative 
will as well as by the creature's. But unless the ideas which 
are to govern man were germane to his nature, they could 
not he appropriated by him, or obtain ascendency over him. 

vi. Hence comes the problem — Have any ideas of this 
order grown up at once in and out of the intellectual and 
moral life of man, i.e. ideas that had the power to master his 
natural impulses and passions, to penetrate, transfigure, and 
command the nature which needed to be subdued, and then, 
by means of the change effected in it, to organize a higher 
and more ethical society ? If so, whence did these ideas 
come ? and what gave them their authority ? 

vii. But if this be the problem, it is obvious in what direc- 
tion we must look for a solution, for modern research has 
proved that the main factor by which the higher ideas and 
emotions are evoked for incorporation in human conduct, 
custom or institution is Religion. In it there is expressed 
a mind which transcends Nature, and reaches out to ideals 
which Nature alone could not realize. If, then, man and the 
powers that move him in history are to be understood, we 
must try to understand the religions. And so we are by 
the philosophy of history introduced to the philosophy of 
Religion. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 

A. Principles : the Idea and Origin of Religion 

PHILOSOPHY, understood as reflexion on our ultimate 
ideas, is almost as old as religion, and began to be the 
moment man consciously enquired concerning beliefs that had 
unconsciously arisen, What do they mean ? He had to live 
much longer, forget much and learn more, before he could 
ask, What do I mean by my beliefs ? A yet vaster revolu- 
tion of time and mind had to happen before he framed the 
questions : What do my beliefs mean to me ? and have their 
many changes of form and setting since the days of my 
youth left them still the old beliefs and still mine ? But all 
these might be discussed as problems in religious philosophy 
without ever raising the distinctive questions in the philoso- 
phy of religion. The two are distinguished thus : the former 
is concerned with religious ideas, but the latter with concrete 
religion ; the one deals with beliefs, their basis, psychological 
genesis, and intellectual forms, but the other enquires why 
religion as an objective fact and living organism has ap- 
peared, and how it has behaved ; what are its sources and 
elements, its ideas and customs ; what its dependency on man 
and on environment ; what functions it has fulfilled, and with 
what results, and for what reasons in personal, tribal, national, 
and collective history. It recognizes religion as a universal 
fact which has to be construed through what is universal in 
human nature ; and it seeks to discover the forces and the 
factors that modify the universal fact into the infinite variety 
of forms it assumes in time and place, and to determine the 



PHILOSOPHY AND THE RELIGIONS 187 

worth of these modifications. Its scope is therefore immense, 
and its problem intricate, but one thing it must never do, 
lose hold upon reality, the phenomena to be explained, or 
forget the obligation that lies upon it of finding for them a 
rational explanation. 



§ I. The Phenomena to be Studied : the Religions 

I. The philosophy of Religion starts with man, and sees 
that whenever and wherever he appears it is as a voyager 
between life and death, conscious of the mystery in which 
his voyage begins and the tragedy in which it ends. It 
never finds him without religious ideas or forms appropriate 
for their expression. These belong to his most solemn acts 
and the customs by which they are sanctioned. If we try 
to make the races of man, with their most transcendental 
ideals and governing enthusiasms, pass before the eye which 
sees in solitude, we shall find that what we have called up is 
a vision impressive above all others to the imagination. For 
we have summoned man in all his tribes and in all his ages to 
defile before us in ghostly procession, bearing his supreme 
hopes and fears, aspirations and agonies, dreams of deity, 
death, and bliss as they are incorporated in his religions. 
We may begin with what is esteemed their lowest and most 
primitive form, religion as interpreted and realized for us by 
the living savage. Anthropology has painted for us a picture 
of him which is as rich and complex as it is real and full ; and 
has made us familiar with his weapons, his ceremonies, his 
ideas, his hopes, and fears. It may have tempted us indeed 
to exaggerate the rudeness, the audacious monstrosity of his 
thought and mythology ; but one thing it has made conspicu- 
ously evident, viz., the place his religious beliefs occupied in 
his mind, and the space his religious customs filled in his life. 
How great these were may be discovered if we compare his 



1 88 THE MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL OUTFITS 

total outfit for life in two respects, the material and the 
spiritual, with our own. 

(a) As to his material outfit. This is represented by a 
rude weapon or two, a piece of flint sharpened to act as knife 
or spear-head ; and possibly, if he be very highly gifted, to 
these may be added a bow and arrow, a fig-leaf round his 
middle, or the fat of some slaughtered animal with which he 
has been wont to daub his body, the scalp of an enemy he 
has worn at his girdle, the skull of a beast he has slain and 
used either as ornament or as weapon. If he dwells on an 
island or by the sea, he may have fashioned and sailed some 
curious canoe ; and if he has learned to love rhythmic sounds, 
he may have contrived to form out of a piece of wood and a 
skin some instrument from which he can produce them. 
These, or something less than these, represent the whole of 
his material equipment ; all the property he has either to 
carry with him to the tomb, or to leave behind to his family 
or his tribe. On the other hand, civilized man is found 
clothed, housed, fed by the products of all lands; able to 
travel over earth and sea with the speed but without the 
fatigues of a winged creature. He dwells in cities adorned 
with art, enriched by commerce, absorbed in industries, gov- 
erned by law, illumined by history, informed by literature, 
comforted by religion, pervaded by a thousand-handed charity 
and watched by an even-handed justice which will not allow 
the aggressor to go unpunished. He can look with eyes that 
see to the ends of the earth, and can listen with ears that 
hear the faintest murmur amid far-off peoples of war or 
disaster, prosperity or distress, the suspicion that alienates 
man or the trust that unites them. If now we compare the 
two, could more utter or more pathetic destitution than that 
of the savage be conceived ? The multitude of things that 
have become not simply conveniences but necessities to the 
civilized man, be he rich or be he poor, which are completely 
unknown to the primitive, makes one feel the distance that 






OF MAN, SAVAGE AND CIVILIZED 189 

lies between the simple state of nature and the wealth of the 
poorest rustic that ever followed a plough, or was carried 
unlamented to his grave. 

(/3) Let us now place, in contrast with their material, their 
respective spiritual outfits. Here, indeed, the wealth of the 
savage bewilders. His ideas as to ghosts and gods are so 
multitudinous that every object he handles, everything he 
sees, has within it a hidden deity. Life, death, and the 
future speak to him as to us ; but, with a more sensitive 
imagination than we can boast, he guards his life by charms 
and rites from those last terrors which cast upon him so 
dark a shadow. Souls he finds everywhere and in every- 
thing; and so he can hardly speak without weaving the 
phenomena of Nature into poetry. We have only to recall 
some of the many forms employed to explain his beliefs in 
order to show how complex they seem to us, whatever may 
have been their cogent reasonableness to himself. We have 
his legends construed in the terms now of a solar, and now 
of a floral mythology. In the one case sun and moon and 
stars are made the ancestors of all his gods and ours ; in 
the other case, these are displaced in favour of trees and 
plants. Then we have an animal mythology, with varied 
legends of animal ancestry, and theories of animal and 
human kinship. Then we have a cosmogonic mythology, 
theories as to how Nature came to be, what the eclipse sig- 
nified, and how the earthquake was caused. And we have 
an historical or ancestral mythology, where the memory of 
the tribe has been turned into a chronicle of divine names 
and a calendar of persons worthy of divine honours. And 
though these schools and types of mythology may signify 
much more as to the ingenuity of the civilized man attempt- 
ing to read the savage mind than they signify as to the 
world which the savage actually knows ; yet the very fact 
that such theories have been possible shows the amount 
of material that has to be interpreted, and the space which 



190 CIVILIZED MAN STILL RELIGIOUS 

spiritual beliefs fill in the savage life. For his customs are 
as full of belief as are his tales : — his institutions, the sacred 
persons, the rain-makers, the wizards, the doctors he trusts ; 
the sacred things like trees and rivers, bones and stones he 
fears ; the sacred places he frequents, like cairns and moun- 
tains, forests and wells ; the cave which he turns into a 
tomb and the grove he rails off as a home for his dead ; the 
charms on which he depends for help against the malign 
forces that dwell in nature or act in man, all express the 
same thing — the wealth of his spiritual outfit compared 
with the appalling poverty of his material possessions. 
This is the more remarkable as civilized man is marked 
by a contrast of the reverse order. His spiritual world — 
however rich in intellectual formulae or aesthetic adornment, 
in ceremonial and musical expression — is like the wilder- 
ness, in which the rose does not blossom, standing over 
against the prodigal luxuriance of the material comforts that 
make up so large a part of his life. It were dangerous to 
draw too sharp an antithesis; but if we judge from the 
ethnographic evidence, we may say that the savage, in 
contrast to the civilized man, is more occupied with super- 
natural and ideal than with natural and material things. 
Nature to him is of spirit all compact, and even the life we 
think so low and brutal has in its dreams and fears and 
crude beliefs the stores of a large imagination. 

2. This absorption of the primitive man in religion is no 
mere accident; on the contrary it means that the nascent 
mind in him feels its kinship with the divine, gropes after it, 
and the more it gropes rises the higher in its manhood ; and 
that it can only begin freely and intelligently to handle mat- 
ter when it has in some measure clarified its outlook towards 
spirit. But if we desire to see how little the increase of 
intercourse with material things signifies any growth out of 
religion, we have only to turn our eyes on the peoples who 
can boast an historical and ordered being. Let us go back 



VISION OF THE RELIGIONS IN HISTORY 191 

to our most ancient civilization, unbury the temples of Egypt, 
disinter her cities, rifle her tombs, unswathe her mummies, 
and read her hieroglyphs ; and what do we find ? That the 
thing that made her the mother of the arts, that bade her 
build her pyramids and her temples, that forced her to pre- 
serve her dead that the disembodied soul might on its return 
find again its ancient home, was belief : faith in the life that 
never died — her religion. Or let us take the greatest nation 
of merchants the world has ever known, the men who first 
learned how to navigate the pathless sea, to colonize for 
commerce, to weave the mysterious signs of the alphabet 
into written speech ; and how do we trace their wanderings 
in search of gain ? By the votive tablets which the Phoeni- 
cian everywhere set up and left behind in the praise of his 
gods. Or let us move eastward till we enter the old Meso- 
potamian valley, dig into its shapeless and melancholy 
mounds and dig out its winged bull or its man-headed lion, 
discover and decipher its cuneiform inscriptions ; and there 
read the history of its wars, the ambitions and the achieve- 
ments of its kings, the myths and the legends of its people ; 
and what have we discovered ? That the thing all lived by 
and lived for was religion ; kings ruled by favour of the 
gods, and delighted in the victories that did them honour. 
Or let us go further eastward till we reach India, and what 
is the idea that there penetrates everything, that fills all 
nature, that builds up and organizes all society, but the idea 
of an omnipresent Deity, who, though impersonal, is yet 
impersonated in all things, the bosom out of which all came, 
and into which all return ? Let us move still eastward till we 
come to China, and there we find man held in the lean yet 
iron fingers of his dead ancestors ; but all his ancestors — 
with the spirits that fill the heaven above, and people the 
earth below — speak to him of one thing — the religion which 
the people did not make, but which has made the people. 
And if we think that by returning to the saner West and 



192 RELIGION THE MOTHER OF ORDER 

investigating its sanest and sunniest peoples we may escape 
from this all-environing belief, what do we find ? That the 
poetry, the art, the philosophy of Greece live and move and 
have their being in its religion ; and without it these could 
not have been either what they were to the Greeks or what 
they are to us. And did not Rome conceive her Empire 
to be so much the creation of the religious idea that her 
emperors came to be honoured as deities ? The gods built 
and ruled the city, and the city achieved her greatness by 
the favour of the gods ; nay, she was herself imperial and 
eternal because she was divine. And what does this ubiquity 
of religion, with its all-penetrative and commanding action, 
mean ? Not simply that man possesses it, but that it pos- 
sesses man, and is the mother of all his order, all his arts, 
and all his architectonic ideas. Till religion, therefore, is 
explained he is inexplicable, and only as it is purified and 
strengthened can he be made perfect. 

3. To speak of religion as the mother of our architectonic 
ideas may seem to many only a form of vain and sounding 
words, yet what they state is the sober truth. The thing 
that anthropology has made most certain is this — that primi- 
tive religion is not the apotheosis of accident, the child of 
nightmare and imaginative terror, but the organizing idea 
of society, the force which holds the whole social system 
together, builds it up, and gives to it its character and unity. 
Order is created because customs are established as religious, 
and are enforced by sanctions too dread to be despised. 
Law is divine, the oath is made sacred, and certain acts are 
stamped as crimes that must be punished by being conceived 
as violations of a will too awful to be corrupted and too 
inexorable to be defied. The forms of early society which 
are denoted by the uncouth terms which we owe to anthro- 
pology — taboo, totemism, fetishism — are the names of so 
many chapters in the early history of religion. By religious 
customs kinship is defined ; through them kingship is estab- 



LAW AND CUSTOM ITS CREATION 193 

lished ; by them the family, the clan, or the tribe, is delim- 
ited ; and because of them the civil institution takes shape 
or finds its root and reason. And as it is in the most primi- 
tive societies, so it is also in the most stable, progressive, and 
civilized. The marvellous continuance of China is the fit 
handiwork of the one religion which can be truly described 
as "ancestor-worship," which has saved the present by caus- 
ing its indefectible loyalty to the past. The social system 
of India, the wonderful order of caste, so hateful and so little 
intelligible to the European, is but the articulation of racial 
pride, enforced by sanctions, preserved by customs, guarded 
by rites, consecrated by associations, which are all religious. 
The ancient empires of the East — Egypt, Assyria, Persia — 
were, in a sense, missionary associations, the victorious con- 
queror being but the potent apostle of his god. The great- 
est personal Empire was the shortest lived, it died with the 
man who made it, for with Alexander its only principle of life 
went out. The apotheosis of the Roman State expressed 
the idea that organized the Roman Empire ; the tendencies 
that undeified the state dissolved its dominion. The societies 
that live longest and exercise the widest sovereignty are those 
which the religious idea has created and inspired. The 
Church of Buddha is a remarkable example of existence con- 
tinued amid diffusion, unbroken by dispersal through peoples 
of alien blood and speech, unhurt by the downfall of friendly 
or the triumph of hostile states. The word of Mohammed 
laid hold upon the Arab tribes, divided by immemorial hates 
and centuries of bloody feuds, and fused them into a nation 
of a single passion and irresistible power. Translated into 
the soil of another and most ungenial race, the same word 
built the throne of the Turk in Europe and the Moghul in 
Asia. Religion remains thus, in all its forms and ages, a 
creative and architectonic force, a power all the more abso- 
lute that it is moral and intellectual rather than material, 
economical, or military. 

p. c. r. 13 



194 THE SCIENCES OF NATURE AND MAN 



§ II. Religion as Universal is Native to Man 

From this rapid survey of religion, both in its primitive and 
historical forms, as of all facts the most universal and dis- 
tinctively human, and as of all factors of movement and of 
social change the most potent and determinative, two or 
three important conclusions follow : 

I. Science cultivates no field so necessary to the complete 
knowledge of man as that occupied by his religions. The 
circle of the sciences concerned with the interpretation of 
nature and man is immense, and it is all the fuller of know- 
ledge and of meaning that no single science stands alone, 
but that each depends immediately or remotely upon all the 
rest. In their presence two things fill me with wonder — 
the immensity of the field they cover, and the inadequacy 
of them all combined, in spite of their coherence and their 
unity, to the interpretation of man as at once the interpreter 
and the interpretation of the universe. If we think of it, is 
not the point where these co-ordinated sciences stop even 
more remarkable than the point where they begin and the 
goal whither they tend ? They start with those mathematics 
which are pure metaphysics, those ideas which the reason 
cannot think without or think away, and which underlie all 
its attempts at the interpretation of Nature as being in space. 
And then from this they rise through the more concrete 
sciences — physical, chemical, geological, biological — till they 
terminate in man as a social and economical being. The 
field is vast and crowded with marvels ; but what is more 
marvellous than even its extent is its limitation. What is 
most cardinal and characteristic in man and his creations 
remains untouched, or is touched only at a point remote from 
the centre, and so distant from the enquirer that he cannot 
so see it as to bring it within the terms of anything that can 



INCOMPLETE WITHOUT RELIGION 195 

be called scientific knowledge or discussion. Science indeed 
attempts to touch religion where it appears as savage custom 
and belief ; but, as we are about to argue, these are for all 
scientific purposes much less significant than the historical 
religions ; while the material they supply is less capable of 
judicial sifting and verification than the material, — monu- 
mental, institutional, literary, artistic, — available in history. 
There are indeed special sciences that cultivate these and 
cognate fields ; but it is one thing to study religious art and 
archaeology, or historical and literary criticism, and quite 
another thing to study the religion that produced the art 
and made the literature. And apart from the religion its 
creations cannot be appreciated ; but to understand religion 
man must be understood, especially as regards those facul- 
ties, real or potential, by virtue of which he is its organ and 
bearer. Now the only science which has seriously concerned 
itself with this question is anthropology, which, like a new 
and more formal comparative anatomy, or a sort of psycho- 
logical palaeontology, takes up the dried and broken and 
scattered bones of savage myth, ritual, and institutions ; and 
then, with the benevolent condescension which marks the 
child of culture when he deals with those lower civilizations 
out of which his own was born, it attempts to discover for 
us the process by which spiritual ideas first entered the 
primitive mind, and then organized themselves into the cus- 
toms and the myths which are the originals of our civilized 
religions. Yet when it has spoken its last word, does it not 
leave unexplained the mystery of thought within the savage 
that compelled him to make and follow the custom, to think 
and create the myth ? The man is more than the environ- 
ment; it never could have acted on him as it is supposed to 
have done, or he have drawn from it what he did, had he 
not been man. More wonderful than the rudeness of his 
tools was the need he felt for them, how he made them, and 
what in his hands they accomplished ; more remarkable than 



i 9 6 RELIGION NECESSARY TO MAN 

the extravagance of his beliefs was their existence, and they, 
like the tools, existed because of him. He, by the marvel- 
lous alchemy of his thought, distilled them from his experi- 
ence ; and they became the strong drink of his mind, now 
intoxicating and now inspiring, yet ever signifying that he 
had, by transfiguring nature into spirit, humanized himself. 
And his maddest dreams have within them the reasonable 
soul of a potential manhood. It does not become us to 
marvel at the grotesque things he said and believed at the 
supreme moment when the reason within him awoke, and he 
looked with the eyes of a dazed and perturbed imagination 
at the world without. For our own speech even now tends 
to become bewildered when we stand in presence of the 
mysteries of being, but are we to cease to think because the 
expression of our thought is inadequate ? And is the scien- 
tific way to belittle thought through the inadequacy of its 
vehicle, or to read the vehicle through the reality of the 
thought? For it must have been some strong instinct in the 
savage that moved him to the creation of these naive beliefs 
and rites which we seek so curiously to explain. And this 
means that it was not the Nature without, but the nature 
within the man and behind the beliefs, that was the really 
significant and causative nature. 

2. Religion is so essential to man that he cannot escape 
from it. It besets him, penetrates, holds him even against 
his will. The proof of its necessity is the spontaneity of its 
existence. It comes into being without any man willing it, 
or any man making it ; and as it began so it continues. Few 
men could give a reason for their belief, and the curious thing 
is that when it is attempted the reasons are, as a rule, less 
rational than the beliefs themselves, and are but rarely 
possessed of a ratiocinative cogency. Its strength on the 
collective side lies in its institutions and usages ; but on the 
personal side in its intellectual ideas and moral ideals. Men 
bear its institutions while they believe its truth ; and no social 



GOVERNS THOUGHT AND ACTION 197 

or political revolution is possible anywhere save by those 
who have revolted from the beliefs on which the society or 
the State has been constituted. In the hour of the revolt 
individual men may will to have nothing to do with reli- 
gion ; but instinct is stronger than will, and religion in some 
form both of idea and usage returns, be it as the memory of 
a dead woman, as with Mill or Comte, or as an abstraction 
like Humanity — le grand Etre — loved of the Positivist, or 
as the Unconscious adored by the Pessimist, or as the Un- 
known affirmed by the logic and worshipped by the awe of 
the Agnostic. And what man is to religion he becomes to 
history. It is in his religion that he knows himself man, and 
through it that he realizes manhood. Like a subtle spirit it 
pervades his whole being, and controls both his personal and 
social development. His first attempts to interpret Nature 
are governed by religious ideas, and from his last attempts 
they are inseparable. He must, for he is rational, think, and 
what is the thought of a reasonable being but a factor which 
relates him to the Infinite and the Eternal ? The society man 
creates, embodies his religious idea, and the same idea orders 
his history. Language in all its terms is instinct with reli- 
gious feeling, and thought in its whole movement is governed 
by the religious problem. In theology philosophy begins, 
and in theology science ends, all the more that it may refuse 
to name the very notions which transcend its sphere and yet 
are implicit in all its premisses and will not be excluded from 
its conclusions. For what is the Agnostic but a man who 
confesses that there are ideas which he will not name but 
cannot escape from — ideas that he must disguise in order 
that he may reason concerning them ? These ideas beget 
the ideals which have an infinite meaning for man, for they 
are born of religion and for ever cause religion to be born 
anew within him. 

3. If religion be, as it were, so built into man as to be the 
heart of his being, it follows that the agencies which work 



198 AS ARCHITECTONICAL IDEA 

most for its amelioration serve man in the highest possible 
degree. Genius is varied, and can accomplish great things in 
all the provinces and spheres of thought and life. In art it 
can give us the things of beauty that are joys for ever, and 
that govern the taste of all later ages ; but art is not the 
whole of life. Sensuous beauty and moral uncleanliness 
have before now lived together without any feeling of 
mutual dislike or disgust ; but in the course of ages the 
moral uncleanliness proves mightier to harm than the sen- 
suous beauty to bless. Genius in literature may create the 
classical forms that educate all later intellects, but the most 
cultivated literary societies have often been cursed by the 
most absolute selfishness. In music the imagination of the 
master can blend the harmony of sweet sounds in the opera 
or oratorio that speaks to man in the language of the gods. 
But the delight music may give is of the sense rather than of 
the soul. Religion, on the other hand, affects and controls 
all these. To it art, pagan or Christian, owes it noblest sub- 
jects and highest inspirations. For it is not to be forgotten 
that art has everywhere lived and moved and had its being 
in religion. This is even more true of classical than of 
mediaeval art, for it was at once a more adequate and a 
more refined expression of the religious ideal. Pheidias 
helped to spiritualize the religion of Greece in a sense and 
degree that has no counterpart in the work of Raphael for 
Italy ; and if we do not read Greek art through the Greek 
idea that the Beautiful was the most fit symbol, if not indeed 
the very synonym, for the Divine, we shall never appreciate 
its nature, or understand what it achieved. From religion, 
too, literature has received the problems which have given it 
dignity, the spirit which has breathed into it sublimity, and 
the soul which has been its life. Without his mythology 
Homer would have made no appeal to the imagination of all 
time. iEschylus would have given us no tragedy, Plato no 
philosophy, Dante no Divine Comedy, Milton no Paradise 



RELIGION HAS ITS PROBLEMS 199 

Lost or Regained, without the motive and the material which 
religion supplied. And these are but typical cases, for to 
illustrate the point as it might be illustrated would be to 
marshal the masterpieces from the literatures of all peoples 
and times. And, finally, without religion music would lose 
most of its power to charm, for it elevates just as it breathes 
the soul of religion, and is the minister of the religious emo- 
tions. The religious is thus, as we have said, the architec- 
tonic idea of society, the commanding idea of conduct, the 
imperial idea of all our being and all our thinking, and he 
who can create its most perfect form is our supreme bene- 
factor — the foremost person in all our history. 

If, then, religion be to such a degree the force which makes 
for order in history, what are the philosophical problems it 
formulates for us ? These are indeed a multitude, but they 
may be said to reduce themselves to three main classes : 
First, those connected with the nature, the origin, and the 
permanence of religion as such, i.e. the religious idea with- 
out reference to any of its specific forms. What is it? 
How did it come to be ? Why does it continue to be ? 
Secondly, those connected with the rise, the peculiar quali- 
ties and characters, and the distinctive behaviour of the 
special religions. How are we to conceive and explain the 
many forms the idea has assumed ? To what causes do 
they owe their being ? What forces — physical, personal, 
political — have worked for their modification ? Thirdly, 
those connected with the historical action and generic 
significance of the particular religions ; i.e. their merits, 
measured by some standard which philosophy may judge 
adequate, as systems embodying an ideal and working for 
its realization in the actual. What gives their worth to 
local religions ? Is it enough that they have a history and 
serve their peoples? Is there such a thing as a universal 
or absolute religion ? In what relation do the particular 
religions stand to each other and to the idea of religion in 



200 HOW RELIGION IS TO BE CONCEIVED 

general? These are large questions, and we shall in this 
chapter confine ourselves to the two prior and fundamental 
points — (i) the idea and origin of religion; (2) the causes 
of variation in religions. The other point, as raising other 
issues, will be better discussed in a later chapter. 

§ III. The Idea and Origin of Religion 

1. Religion, so far as it is a matter of philosophical investi- 
gation, has a twofold sense — a subjective and an objective, 
or a personal and a collective, or an ideal and an historical. 
As subjective it denotes certain thoughts, ideas, feelings, and 
tendencies which belong to man as man. As objective it 
denotes the beliefs, the legends, the mythologies, the sacred 
books and creeds in which the thought is articulated; the 
ritual, ceremonial, acts or institutions of worship in which the 
feeling is embodied ; the customs or laws by which the acts 
are regulated and sanctioned ; and the practices, conventions, 
and social judgments by which the tendencies are developed 
and enforced. A provisional definition might therefore run 
somewhat thus: — Religion is, subjectively, man's conscious- 
ness of relation to suprasensible Being; and, objectively, the 
beliefs, the customs, the rites, and the institutions which 
express and incorporate this consciousness. But it may be 
necessary to say something more in explanation of both sides 
of this definition. 

(i.) As to the subjective side, what is this consciousness ? 
Can it be resolved into any single faculty or the function 
of any faculty, perception of the Infinite, intuition, or faith ? 
Is it an intellectual, an emotional, or an ethical consciousness ? 
Religion has, indeed, been conceived now as an act or state of 
knowledge, now as an act or state of feeling, now as an act 
or state of conscience. As thought or knowledge, it is a sort 
of provisional philosophy; as feeling, it is a more or less 
inchoate mysticism, a sense of dependence on Nature or 
natural forces or the Absolute; as a state of conscience, it 



DEFINITIONS CRITICIZED 20 r 

has been resolved into a high morality, again into morality 
touched with emotion ; and still again, into a categorical 
imperative apprehended as- a Divine command. But the 
religious consciousness is too rich to be represented by any 
single element in the conscious life of man. It is neither 
knowledge, whether described as intuition or thought ; nor 
feeling, whether conceived as sense of dependence or ad- 
miration ; nor conscience, whether as a sense of obligation or 
as an organized and externalized authority. It is no one of 
these, yet it contains within it all these, for it is a conscious- 
ness which includes the whole energy of man as reasonable 
spirit. There cannot be religion without knowledge, for faith 
and knowledge are rather a unity than a true antithesis. 
Faith is intellectual, involves thought ; and it is only as man 
conceives an object that he can have any conscious relation 
to it. The Unknown, as outside man's consciousness, is an 
object neither of thought nor of faith ; and so has for him 
no real being, nor any relation to his conscious life. There 
can, therefore, be no religion without thought, for not to 
think were not to believe — to have nothing that could be 
described as either object or article of faith. Nor can religion 
exist without feeling, for all thought implies feeling ; and 
there can be no feeling without thought. To be conscious of 
emotion is to know ourselves as its subject, and something 
not ourselves as its cause or object ; and the feeling will in 
its quality correspond to the qualities which thought has 
predicated of its cause. No man can have a feeling of 
dependence who has not conceived himself as dependent on 
something, or conceived Some One as existing on whom he 
depends. Nor can religion be apart from conscience, for con- 
science is the unity of knowledge and feeling, the knowledge 
of the difference between acts and the qualities of acts, and 
the feeling of obligation to do acts that are of a given kind 
or have a certain quality. And so a relation such as is 
realized in religion is exactly the kind that supplies con- 



202 RELIGION A MUTUAL RELATION 

science with its law or norm. The consciousness, therefore, 
which knows itself related to suprasensible Being represents 
not one faculty, but the whole exercised reason — the concrete 
spirit reaching upwards and outwards to a spirit as concrete 
as itself. 

(ii.) Turning now to the objective side, it is clear that the 
relation of which man is conscious is conceived as mutual, 
and not simply as one-sided. The God he thinks of is one 
who speaks to him as well as one who can be spoken to. 
The mutual relation is therefore conceived as a mutual 
activity ; there is reciprocity between the related persons. 
Man worships, but God hears and sees and responds. While 
man offers himself to God, God communicates Himself to 
man. If it were believed that God ceased to be related to 
man, man would feel as if he also were without relation to 
God. And this implies an important addition to the ideas 
both of the object who is adored and the subject or person 
who adores, viz., the idea of a law or will which unifies the 
two and governs the relations which man, by his usages, 
seeks to establish between himself and the Deity. That 
law or will is the God who, as immanent both in nature 
and in man, is their common principle of unity. The 
evolution of religion is not a mere subjective process 
worked by an unconscious dialectic ; it is a process in which 
man's whole environment takes part. It is due, as it were, 
to the converse of the soul with Nature — impossible without 
the soul to speculate, to question, to argue, to infer ; but im- 
possible also without an order that impels the soul to ask, and 
that answers as much by silence as by speech. And the real 
respondent in this controversy or discussion which provokes 
the soul to the dialectic that becomes religion, is not nature 
but God, the transcendent Reason using the terms of experi- 
ence to awaken the transcendental idea. The Maker of man 
does not cease from relation with the man He made, and 
He cannot be related without exercising influence over him. 






IN IT BOTH GOD AND MAN ACTIVE 203 

This relation is one which every philosophy that seeks any 
ideal aim or rational process in this world has recognised. 
The reason that is in man is one with the universal Reason ; 
his ideals must serve the order or stream of tendency which 
guides the systems of things to which he belongs. To 
conceive man and God as so related is to conceive the one 
as the form or vehicle in which the Other lives and through 
which He speaks. And so to complete the idea of the factors 
that work subjectively for the creation of religion, we must 
not forget the God who dwells in consciousness any more 
than the consciousness which knows of His indwelling. 

2. But the distinction between the subjective and objective 
senses of religion will, by being translated into more concrete 
terms, bring us to a new stage in our argument. The equiva- 
lent of the subjective sense is man, conceived as reason or 
spirit, the ideal ego who cannot be without thought and 
cannot think without affirming Deity. And the equivalents of 
the objective sense are the phenomena, the personal, social 
and ceremonial forms which embody his ideas, or constitute 
outward religion. Now if the relation between these two be 
conceived under the category of causation, man may be 
regarded as the producer, religion as the produced ; but this 
needs to be qualified, as man is not an absolute cause, but 
conditioned ; he never acts in isolation, but ever as a creature 
who lives within the limits of time and under the stimulus 
of place. Yet the most conditioned cause retains its causal 
functions and character ; and so the subject must be con- 
ceived as the generative agent in religion. If, again, the 
relation be construed under the category of time, priority of 
being must be claimed for the subject through whose con- 
sciousness religion is realized. But the distinction is unreal, 
for the moment man thinks, his thought is objectified, and it 
exists for him only as it is an object. The two things, sub- 
jective and objective religion, are then, as a matter of fact, 
inseparable, though it is also true that in the order of thought 



204 ETHNOGRAPHY NOT A PHILOSOPHY 

the subjective is in being and in action the prior, the objective 
the later. In other words, man is before history ; history is 
in consequence of man; i.e., it is the unfolding and expression 
of potentialities that were latent within him, and that have 
been evoked in the course of his personal and collective 
life. It is impossible indeed for history to reach the first 
man and describe him as he really was. He is, whether 
understood as person or as species, more or less symbolical, 
a creature of the imagination, made in order that he may be 
argued about. And this is as true of the idea of the primi- 
tive state as it is of the idea of the primitive man, whether 
with theology we speak of the one as Eden and of the other 
as Adam, or with science we describe the primitive as a 
savage state and name the person half-man, half-brute. 
Where we cannot investigate we must be content to specu- 
late ; and so all enquiries into the origin of early beliefs 
and institutions, however disguised in archaeology or in 
history, are really philosophical. Our modern anthropologies 
are in heart and essence as speculative as mediaeval scholas- 
ticism or as any system of ancient metaphysics. Indeed, 
the most barbarous metaphysical jargon which has ever 
been foisted upon patient thought, is that which uses terms 
like " taboo," " totem," " fetish," " ghost," to denote indis- 
criminated and even most dissimilar ideas, which are often, 
on the most unsifted and dubious evidence, attributed, first, 
to some scarcely known tribe ; then, by an act of audacious 
generalization, to all primitive peoples ; and, finally, to 
aboriginal man. There is no region where a healthy and 
fearless scepticism is more needed than in the literature 
which relates to ethnography. There is no people so 
difficult to understand and to interpret as a savage people ; 
there is no field where competent interpreters are so few 
and so rare, where unlearned authorities are so many and 
so rash, or where testimonies are so contradictory, or so 
apt to dissolve under analysis into airy nothings. But 



THOUGH A PHILOSOPHY IS ITS PREMISS 205 

what we deprecate is not the collection, the investigation, 
and the co-ordination of all facts connected with the 
habits, beliefs, state, and affinities of savage peoples ; it 
is the philosophy they may be made to disguise. For the 
explicit and reasoned or implicit and inarticulated postulate 
of many ethnographically stated and illustrated speculations 
as to the earlier forms of religion, is a doctrine not simply 
as to the development of man and society, but as to the kind 
of being who was to be developed, what potentialities he had, 
and what forces made him the being he finally became. It 
is this doctrine which may both need criticism and repay it. 
For it does not follow that the anthropology which is an 
accurate description of man in his savage state is a good 
philosophy of religion. 

3. The point of our criticism may become more obvious if 
we distinguish the question touching the subjective and 
objective senses of religion from two very different questions, 
those, viz., as to the source of religion, and as to its oldest and 
most primitive form. The question as to the source asks, 
Why did man begin to have a religion ? but the question as 
to the form enquires, What sort of religion had he in the 
beginning ? It is possible, indeed, to agree as regards the 
sort of religion man began by having, and to differ funda- 
mentally as to why and as to how he came by it. We may 
hold that in religion, as in other things, the primitive were 
the rudest and the lowest forms ; while we also hold that 
they owed their existence, low as it was, to what was highest 
and most rational in man, even as he then was, reaching 
out towards what was highest and most reasonable in the 
universe. If we so think, we shall see in the lowest form 
the promise and potency of the highest, just as we see in 
the savage himself the prophecy of reason and knowledge, 
culture and civilization. But if we conceive that not reason, 
but accident or ignorance, was the subjective factor of re- 
ligion, then we shall regard his beliefs as a series of " mis- 



206 AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 

taken inferences " or as a " system of superstitions " to be 
outgrown with the growth of knowledge, rather than as a 
soil rich with the germs of higher things. The phrase we 
have just used is Mr. Herbert Spencer's, but it is not a very 
felicitous phrase. A " superstition " is the belief of a lower 
stage of culture surviving into a higher, with which it has 
no affinity, and to which it adheres as a sort of fungus. 
Hence the belief in lucky days or magic formulae, in witches 
or charms, becomes in an age of science a " superstition ; " 
for it is a survival from a period when the notion of natural 
law was not into a period which conceives Nature as pre- 
eminently the realm of law. But the belief is not a " super- 
stition " when it is part of a consistent whole, an integral 
element in the living view of Man and Nature. The term, 
therefore, is not applicable to the religions of lower races, 
which are entirely relevant to their stage of culture, and 
to use it of them is significant only as indicating the attitude 
of the enquirer's own mind. What it here expresses is Mr. 
Spencer's theory that the religion, or " system of supersti- 
tion which the primitive man forms," is due to " mistaken 
inferences " or to " erroneous interpretations " of familiar 
phenomena. But in order that he may formulate his theory 
in a manner that proves it, Mr. Spencer has first to make 
his " primitive man " ; and this man is, of course, a purely 
imaginary creature, made in the study and after the image 
of his maker. And the religion attributed to him is as 
imaginary as himself, for it is put together by a method 
that knows no order and follows no law. Time and place, 
race and racial relations, historical antecedents and con- 
ditions, degree of culture and moment of development, are, 
in the matter of proof and method of treatment, utterly 
ignored. Thus Mr. Spencer will, in the same chapter, or 
even paragraph, cite the Tahitians, the American Indians, 
the New Zealanders, the Veddahs, the ancient Hindus, 
the modern Hindus, various African tribes, the Egyptians, 



STATED AND CRITICIZED 207 

the Greeks and Romans, the Hebrews, the Arabians, 
Semites in general, and " Europeans in the old times," 
whoever they may have been, whether Esquimaux, Finns, 
Basques, Kelts, Teutons or Slavs, and multitudes more, — to 
illustrate some particular statement or doctrine without the 
slightest regard to the cardinal point of their respective 
environments, and the no less cardinal point of the 
history and " experiences " of their antecedent organisms. 
He handles religions as if there was no such thing as , 
chronology, or place, or genetic development, or historical 
evolution. Criticism, historical and literary, is for him as 
if it were not. He never distinguishes old and original 
from recent and foreign elements, but deals with the 
immensest systems as if they had had no history and 
had known no growth, at least none save such as could be 
determined by " the laws of mental evolution." x He cites 3 
the Rig Veda and the Laws of Manu as alike veracious 
witnesses as to " what the original Aryan beliefs were," 
which is very much as if one were to quote the Epistles of 
Paul and the Decrees of the Vatican Council as equally 
valid testimonies concerning the most primitive elements in 
Christianity. With quite as delightful naivete the Hebrews 
are proved to have had " rites like those of ancestor- 
worshippers in general," mainly by an appeal to Deuter- 
onomy, Ecclesiasticus and the Book of Tobit. 3 The 
" Hebrew ideas of another life " are described in a few crude 
sentences, 4 and ideas of Persian origin and peculiar to later 
Judaism are regarded as distinctively Hebrew. The Greek 
and Roman religions are handled without regard to their 
origin or significance, and are made to illustrate Mr. Spencer's 
thesis either by an utter inversion or entire forgetfulness of 
their meaning. He is aware, indeed, that his interpretations 
will be called " Euhemeristic," but he does not see that 

1 Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 232. 2 Ibid. p. 315. 

3 Ibid. 317. 4 Ibid. 208. 



208 ETHNOGRAPHY AND HISTORY 

the objection to Euhemerism is that it is radically unhistorical 
and unscientific, possible only where a developed mythology 
is studied through a philosophy ; quite impossible where 
it has been studied in its genesis and development. It is 
significant, too, that he is as confident about his doctrines 
and theories when he cannot as when he can find evidence 
for them in the ancient religions. He finds in none but the 
Egyptian evidence of belief in a Resurrection, but he never 
seems to miss it. His case in no way rests on history or 
criticism ; it is an evolution from consciousness, a theory 
transcendently deduced, ethnographically illustrated, but in 
no case historically proved. Allow a man to adapt the 
laws of logic and the method of proof to his own con- 
venience, and give him the whole of time to range over 
for illustrations of his peculiar theory, and he will prove 
it ; only the theory, when proved, will have but small 
scientific significance, since without any real relation to 
the growth of mind and the order of human development. 

§ IV. Ethnographic and Historical Religion 

I. Now this criticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer has, it is hoped, 
made several things evident. First, the difference between 
the ethnographic and the historical treatment of religion. 
Ethnography studies and sketches features, characteristics, 
customs, scattered, insulated, or separable phenomena ; but 
history studies the organism as it lives and grows in its own 
home, affected by all the forces that surround and play 
upon it. In ethnography the writer selects the incidents, the 
customs, the beliefs, the qualities that interest him, groups 
and grades them in his own way, throws the emphasis where 
he thinks it ought to lie ; in a word, states the problem in his 
own terms, and finds the factors that he imagines will solve 
it ; but history allows him no such freedom, defines for him 
the time and the space within which he must move, the 
growth he has to measure, the variations he has to explain. 



THE METHODS OF MEN AND NATURE 209 

The only development ethnography can be made to exhibit 
is the one which the writer designs ; it is like a picture 
painted on a flat surface by an artist who creates his own 
perspective, and by a skilful use of light and shade compels 
us to see just what his imagination has seen and as he saw it. 
But history presents us with a development which nature 
and man have combined to conduct, invites us to watch it 
proceeding, and to discover the factors by which it has been 
or is being accomplished. The ethnographic method is thus 
subjective, and either, if the man who uses it be an artist, 
simply descriptive, or, if he be a thinker, an illustrated 
dogmatic, i.e. a system speculatively deduced, though ex- 
pounded in terms drawn from savage customs, real or 
imaginary. But the historical method is objective, and is 
possible only to a man who has an eye to see and to read, as 
if it were a living thing, the complex unity of thought and 
custom which man made for a religion to himself, and in 
making which he made himself man, and became a society, a 
state, and a people. It is not too much to say, that if Mr. 
Spencer had studied at first hand a single historical religion, 
we should never have had the theory which forms the basis 
of his sociology. And what is true of him may be said 
of many another ethnographer who has tried to turn his 
descriptive science into a philosophy. 

2. But a second thing our criticism has made evident is the 
distinction and independence of the questions concerned 
respectively with the primitive form and the source or origin 
of religion. The question as to the form is historical, but 
there is no history that can resolve it. But the question as 
to the source is philosophical, and so admits of discussion. 
Yet there is a connexion between the two which may be thus 
indicated : — If we cannot trace religion to the hallucinations 
or dreams, with their suggestion of mysterious " doubles," of 
a gorged or a hungry savage, it will be impossible for us to 
describe its oldest or most rudimentary forms in such terms 

P.C.R. . 14 



2io RELIGION ROOTED IN REASON 

as " superstitions " or " mistaken inferences." What this 
means will become apparent in the next discussion, which 
has to determine two points : (a) the relation between the 
subjective factor and the objective fact of religion, and (/3) 
between the assumed primitive or ethnographic religion, and 
the religions of history. 

(a) The subjective factor is Mind, or, more concretely, Man, 
conceived as nascent reason, and so constituted that he 
cannot become rational without realizing religion. The 
first effort of the reason is to distinguish itself from Nature, 
i.e. to become a conscious person ; and the second is to 
transcend the Nature which it knows is different from itself, 
i.e. to create an order which is not an order of Nature, but of 
Reason. Now both processes are accomplished in the same 
way — by the evolution and articulation of ideas which are 
native to the reason, because the ideas by virtue of which it 
is rational. These ideas are not external things implanted 
in the mind by various cunning contrivances, but they are 
educed from within, the products of thought acting according 
to its own nature or laws. The most hopeless of all problems 
ever set to human ingenuity is this : Grant an organized 
being without reason, by what process of Nature can we get 
reason inserted within him ? Man does not get reason from 
without ; he is reason, and as reason awakens it speaks, and 
its speech embodies the ideas which reveal its nature, and 
which are at the same time the mirror in which it beholds 
itself. Thus it follows that the ideas which reason expresses 
must correspond in character and quality to what it is in 
itself, rather than to what can only be defined as the nega- 
tion of itself. What these ideas are we may best express 
by saying that they are those of a being who cannot think 
without thinking God, or act without incorporating his 
thoughts in appropriate customs and institutions, i.e. as his 
thoughts are beliefs concerning Deity, his usages are forms 
which speak of his relations to the Deity and of the Deity's 






BUT CONDITIONED BY NATURE 21 r 

to him. This means that man can as little choose to be 
religious as to be rational ; he is both, and both by the same 
necessity of Nature. For expression is a necessity to reason ; 
if it is to live, it must by speaking create speech. And, 
similarly, expression is a necessity to religion ; if it is to live, 
it must take to itself shape — make for itself a body ; and 
this body will have a double correspondence, on the one side 
to the reason, on the other to the place which is its home. 

And it is here where we may perceive the relation between 
the subjective factor and the objective fact. For religion, 
though its source be ideal, is yet not pure but embodied 
spirit, an expression of the reason conditioned by the 
environment in which it lives. Man can as little think as 
he can live in a vacuum, and the place he occupies will 
supply both form and colour to the thoughts he articulates. 
In other words, religion at its birth is an epitome alike of 
the spirit which bears it and the natural conditions within 
which that spirit lives. In it are mingled all the elements 
which compose the man and constitute his world. He can 
think of the gods only under terms intelligible to his 
intellect ; still, however rude the form under which he thinks 
them, it is of gods he thinks. He may conceive the divine 
as the magic which dwells in some stick or stone, in some 
old garment or strange plant ; or as the mysterious power 
which resides in some animal — a bull or bear, a dog or cat ; 
or in some person— poet, medicine man, or chief; but how- 
ever he may conceive it, what he conceives is to him as real 
a deity, and as truly supernatural, as Jehovah was to the 
Hebrews. The living heart of his belief is the theistic idea 
the form in which he expresses it is the accident of time 
and place, marking the stage and quality of his culture, and 
connoting the conditions — climatic, geographical, ethnical, 
and political — under which he has lived. The form is, as 
it were, the double of the world he lives in— therefore the 
creation of experience ; but the matter is the double of the 



212 MIND MAKES THE MATTER 

spirit he is — therefore the product of his own transcendency. 
His religion is made up, then, of two constituents (i.) the 
substantive or ideal, i.e. the conception of the transcendental, 
the supernatural, or the divine, which is a product of thought 
working on the phenomena it perceives ; and (ii.) the formal 
or real, i.e. the terms or vehicles which embody his ideas, the 
stories, rites, and customs that come out of his own experi- 
ence, both outer and inner. The ethnographic student of 
religion tends to emphasize the latter, and to select now one, 
and now another, of its features as the chief or essential 
element in religion. The emphasis has fallen now on the 
philological or literary expression ; and the mythology, the 
folklore, the divine names and attributes have been investi- 
gated and compared. Then the emphasis has changed to 
institution or custom ; and the totem, the sacrifice, the priest, 
the magician have become the fields of research and specu- 
lation. But these by themselves are more significant of 
the stage of culture than of the nature or character of the 
religion. For if man tells certain stories of his gods, it is 
only such stories as he could believe were they told of the 
more heroic men ; and if he believes that the sacrifice is 
a meal which satisfies the gods, it is because he knows 
that even such a meal would please men, and express or 
seal amicable relations between them. But the life and 
permanence of the religion do not lie in the elegance of the 
mythology or the persistence of the institution or custom ; 
they lie rather in the continued and refining activity of the 
thought. It would be hard to exaggerate the rudeness of 
the form which religion assumes in the lower stages of 
culture ; but this ought not to conceal from us the fact 
that the process which produced it was in its own order, 
if not as fine yet as rational and real, as that to which we 
owe the art, the poetry, and the philosophy of to-day. 
Man produced it because he was struggling to express or 
realize himself, within a system that forced him to be rational 



NATURE THE FORM OF RELIGION 213 

in order that he might be man while the system remained 
Nature. And the real continuity of religion lies in the 
continued activity of the creative process, the thought which 
is ever refining the forms it has inherited, and seeking fitter 
vehicles for its richer and sublimer ideas. 

(/3) The second question, as to the relation between 
ethnographic religion and the historical religions, is as im- 
portant from a scientific as the first question was from a 
philosophical point of view. The generalities of anthropology 
may show how features persisted or customs survived ; but 
they do not help us to see how the organisms called historical 
religions were built up, and quickened, and developed. To 
find a multitude of " survivals " is a thing as easy as it is 
insignificant ; but what is much more difficult to explain, and 
much worthier of explanation, is how so many religious 
beliefs and customs have died while religion has survived, 
their death tending rather to its rejuvenescence than its 
decay. And what does this mean but the want of objective 
validity in what we have termed ethnographic religion as 
opposed to the religions of history ? What is presented to 
us as the religion of primitive peoples is a mere abstract system 
stated and developed in the terms of generalized customs 
rather than of logical formulae. The term totem, used by the 
North American Indians to denote one of their own customs, 
has been applied to Australasian tribes whose customs are 
too varied to be stated in identical terms, being indeed often, 
as the latest researches show, exactly the converse of the 
Indian ; and the conveyance of the phrase has been naturally 
followed by the attribution of the thing and the whole order 
of thought it represented. But a particular fact stated as a 
general proposition is an argumentative proceeding whose 
worth can be easily appraised. As a consequence this 
product of the ethnographic method can be brought into 
organic relation with no single historical religion. Mr. 
Andrew Lang has plaintively bewailed that the strata in 



214 SAVAGE RELIGION LESS SIGNIFICANT 

the field he has so thoroughly studied and so interestingly- 
described, are not superimposed or even adjacent, but widely 
scattered. And the difficulty is to find the succession of the 
scattered strata ; their sequence is a thing of imagination 
or conjecture, not of history. The fragments have to be 
collected, like the limbs of Osiris, from the most distant 
places, only Osiris has to be made out of the limbs, with no 
certainty that he ever was, or, if he ever were, that the limbs 
were really his. The image made of members collected from 
India, Australasia, America, China, Africa, and Europe, can 
hardly be expected to make a very homogeneous figure, 
though, indeed, it may well be a figure capable of being the 
parent of anything. But the impossibility of affiliating the 
forms or of finding any valid sequences in their order, makes 
the attempt to find the origin and roots of religion, or to 
define and determine its function in history and in the 
evolution of society through the study of its meanest and 
most barbarous forms, seem an altogether fallacious pro- 
cedure. For religion is neither a peculiarity of the savage 
state, nor is it there that its social action can best be 
studied. Man does not leave it behind him as he leaves 
his stone implements, his cave dwellings, his nakedness, his 
polyandry, and the other accidents of his savagery. It is 
the one thing that can be described as his invariable attribute ; 
and, like all things which do not die, its higher or more 
perfect forms are more significant of its real nature, and 
therefore of its actual source and cause, than any multitude 
of low forms or rudimentary types. This does not mean 
that the comparative study of the primitive religions is 
worthless ; on the contrary, it is a discipline that no student 
of human nature and history can afford to despise. The 
more we know of savage man the better we shall know 
man civilized ; but then civilized has even more significance 
for savage man than savage for civilized, especially if our 
purpose is to discover his possibilities and intrinsic worth. 



THAN THE RELIGION OF THE CIVILIZED 215 

The meaning of childhood becomes apparent to us only in 
and through manhood ; and though the psychology of the 
child may be a matter of inexhaustible interest to the man, 
and most instructive to him if he be a parent or a teacher, yet it 
is only in the man that the mind of the child stands revealed. 
So if religion be studied through savage custom and myth, 
some religions may be better understood, and some elements 
in all religions may be made more intelligible ; but religion 
as the most potent, universal, and permanent of all human 
things will not be any nearer scientific explanation. For it 
can be explained only as it is traced to causes which are as 
common and as constant as itself, which operate even more 
powerfully in the civilized than in the savage state, and do so 
because the civilized man is a truer type of humanity, because 
he is more of a man, than the savage. 

§ V. The Causes of Variation in Religion 

Religion, then, is best studied as an organism living within 
its own special habitat, experiencing change even while it 
performs work, and developing new organs and functions 
because it is daily challenged to exercise new energies. But 
this brings us to a question concerning which something 
must be said, viz., if religion have a common and single 
root, why have we such a multitude of religions ? Are there 
any natural causes working for variation ? The fundamental 
principle here is : What is most generic in religion has at 
once its root and organ in what is most generic in man. He 
is religious not by chance but by Nature, not by choice but 
by necessity. He did not stumble into religion, but grew 
into it, and it grew in and with him. The true survival in 
religion is not the superstition or the custom which persists 
from a lower into a higher state, but the idea which under- 
goes transfiguration but not conversion. The persistence of 
the idea means the continuous activity of the creative factor, 
but the infinite variety of the forms it assumes are due 



216 CONFLICT OF THE IDEAL AND FORMAL 

to causes more or less local and occasional. There is a con- 
stant conflict between the ideal and the formal elements in 
religion. The spirit which created is never satisfied with 
its own creations, is ever returning on them, questioning, 
doubting, re-formulating them ; and it is by being continually 
handled that they continuously live, outgrow their ancient 
forms, and effect changes even in the things they themselves 
had made. But the forms — creeds, customs, laws, ceremonies, 
priesthoods — represent the formal elements ; and their in- 
variable tendency is to impose themselves and their limitations 
on the ideal. Man is conservative by virtue of what in him 
is local and particular — what is his own in distinction not 
only from what is another person's, but what is man's ; but 
he is progressive by virtue of what in him is universal and 
generic — what in him is his own because he is man. Hence, 
while the ethnographic student thinks that the custom and 
the institution, as the best conserved and least changeable 
element in religion, is the most characteristic and important ; 
the philosophical student, aware that the institution endures 
only by virtue of the ideas read into it, seeks the secret of 
the religion in these ideas and their source. Without these 
the institution would die and the custom cease ; it is the 
universal that keeps the local alive, while the local is ever 
threatening the universal with death. It is, therefore, in the 
local and occasional causes which create the outward forms 
that the factors of variation must be sought. 

These are too many to be here analyzed and described, but 
they may be reduced to certain great categories, such as race, 
place, ethnical relations, history, social and economical needs, 
and special or creative personalities. Each of these affects 
religion on many sides and in many ways. We note only 
the most salient. 

I. Race. It is easy to exaggerate both the fact and the 
function of racial characteristics, yet it is hardly open to 
doubt that such characteristics really exist. There is a psy- 



RACE AS FACTOR OF CHANGE 217 

chology of peoples as well as of persons, and communities 
exhibit on a large scale the distinctive qualities that particular 
persons show on a scale infinitely minute. The fact that the 
literature of one people can be translated into that of another, 
implies their likeness ; the fact that no translation can be 
the exact equivalent of the original, implies their difference. 
When M. Renan, in his early work on the Semitic Languages, 
expatiated on what he termed the monotheistic instinct of 
the Semitic peoples, he gave poetical expression to what he 
conceived to be a racial characteristic. This instinct might 
have no more to justify it in fact than that the parent 
monotheism of the world issued from a Semitic people ; but 
the theory forgot that no Semitic people has been able by 
its own act to make monotheism a reality. The Arabian, 
without the help of the Persian on the intellectual side and 
the Tartar on the political and military, would never have 
made Islam the great missionary religion it became, and has 
remained. The Jew would have cancelled his monotheistic 
ideal by his tribal enthusiasm, which allowed the Gentile to 
become a worshipper of Jehovah only on the condition that 
he became a Jew. Yet the passion that breathed the breath 
of life into the idea of the one God, and made it live to other 
races, was distinctly Semitic. The passion may have implied 
a deficiency of imagination and a simplicity of thought, both of 
which may have been due to early associations with a nature 
more severe and monotonous than fruitful and varied ; but 
whatever the reason, monotheism was in its origin a Semitic 
faith. The Aryan, on the other hand, has never been spon- 
taneously monotheistic, though often monistic. The unities 
he has striven after have been unities of thought, abstractions 
rather than concrete personalities. He has loved to make 
his gods either speak in forms more or less appropriate to 
the senses, or exist in formulae more or less intelligible to the 
reason : according to the one impulse he has been a polytheist, 
according to the other he has been a pantheist ; and the har- 



218 PLACE AS FORMAL FACTOR OF IDEAS 

mony of the tendencies has been seen -in this, that where he 
has been most pantheistic his polytheism has been the most 
multitudinous. These tendencies may express influences 
flowing out of ancient years when the susceptible mind 
was impressed and worked upon by a nature that seemed 
alive, that blossomed into beauty, that burst into fruitfulness, 
and ever revealed to sense an inner energy of being that 
delighted to break out in life and growth. But whatever may 
be the cause of its special characteristics, race has its value 
in things both of the mind and the imagination ; and so we 
but formulate an obvious conclusion when we say that blood 
counts in religion as a factor determining its special type. 

2. Place acts variously upon a people, but there are 
two distinct influences it may exercise ; — either, directly, a 
physical, or, indirectly, an ethnical, due to its power from 
its position or its configuration to hinder or to promote 
human intercourse. Thus the child of the mountains or the 
son of the desert has each had his beliefs directly affected 
and modified by his place. The nature which environs 
the two is so different that the ideas it begets in them 
as to the creative and conservative powers appear in very 
different forms and with dissimilar qualities. If the sun 
dispels the cloud around the mountain, thaws the ice in 
the valleys, and sends down the fertilizing streams into the 
plains, it will have one meaning . for man ; and if it beats 
hotly upon him by day, endangering by its beams his life, 
heating the sand under his foot, and drying the water 
in the springs, it will have quite another meaning for him. 
And as he will read through the great forces of Nature that 
which is behind it, the sun will in the one case become to 
him the name or symbol of a beneficent deity; in the other 
case of a demonic or of an actually or potentially maleficent 
power. And so the attitude of man's mind to the theistic 
idea, and the terms or forms he uses to express it, will be 
largely conditioned by his physical environment. Hence 



TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE 219 

races cradled amid a fruitful Nature, — where its vital force 
is the most manifest thing, compelling men to feel as if 
suckled at breasts of inexhaustible fulness — come to think 
of the creative life as something spontaneous and inner, an 
energy which struggles from within outwards. But races 
whose cradle has been the desert or the arid plain — where 
the forces without wither the feeble life that tries to issue 
from within, and where a man has to be strong if Nature 
is to be subdued — tend to think of the creative energy as 
outward, something which imposes its will on the reluctant 
wilderness. In the former case the tendency is to conceive 
Deity as an immanent energy, and life is deified as with the 
Egyptians, or the soul which dwells in all men and rolls 
through all things is made the sovereign god, as with the 
Brahma of the Hindus. In the latter case the tendency is 
to conceive Deity as outside and above Nature, a force which 
acts upon it rather than lives within it ; and so gods are 
named masters, makers, lords, and described in the terms 
so familiar to the student of the Semitic religions. When 
the elements latent in each of these attitudes of mind are 
developed and unified, the conception becomes in the one 
case that of Divine immanence, in the other that of Divine 
transcendence. When the idea which had spontaneously 
arisen comes to be speculatively construed, the immanence 
will blossom into a Pantheism, the transcendence into a 
Monotheism. And as an indication of the long persistence 
of qualities which physical influences had tended to create, 
it deserves to be noted that while Pantheism is native to 
both Hindu and Greek thought, it has never appeared as 
a native product among any Semitic people, the cases which 
do occur having been due to the action of alien thought 
on special persons. And we may add, it is not without 
significance that the race which first learned the meaning of 
the Pole-star to the mariner, was one which came of a desert 
parentage. It applied to the trackless ocean the instincts 



220 INFLUENCE OF ETHNICAL RELATIONS 

that had been transmitted to it through fathers who had 
learned to seek in the heavens above guides for their way 
through the trackless sand below. 

3. Ethnical relations, largely also affected by place, exer- 
cise varied influences. Their kind and degree and effect 
will depend on such things as whether the peoples meet 
as friends or foes, as cognates or aliens, as buyers and 
sellers, or as explorers and explored ; whether they touch 
as it were only from a distance or mix and intermingle ; 
whether their culture is alike or different in character 
and in stage ; whether the one is of an established order 
with fixed laws and recognized usages, while the other is, 
in all similar respects, fluid and unformed ; whether the one 
is conqueror and the other conquered, or both are equals. 
Thus the lower races are powerfully affected by the presence 
of the higher. It is doubtful whether the man who visits a 
new people that he may study their customs, does not cause 
or occasion some of the most characteristic customs he de- 
scribes. The very attempt to render to a stranger an account 
of the thing he does, changes the attitude of the simple mind 
to the thing or to the mode of doing it Wherever the foot 
of the white man touches, it works changes in the thoughts, 
blood, ways, and worship of the people. He may not mean 
to effect any change, but he effects one all the same ; and 
his ubiquity has now made the discovery of a pure native 
religion a thing no longer possible. Then it has been often 
remarked, though not always with truth, that the gods of 
one race or tribe become the devils of another ; and it is 
even more curious that the two things which people can 
most easily interchange are their vices and their gods. This 
is no new thing, but as old as man. It did not need to 
wait for illustration upon the action of our merchants and 
missionaries to-day ; Egypt and Phoenicia, Babylonia and 
Assyria knew it, and ancient literature is full of it. The 
intercourse of peoples then as now worked for good and 



NEW PEOPLES IN THE HANDS OF OLD 221 

evil, hastened civilization even where it changed religion. 
The races that were planted on the northern shores of the 
Mediterranean came early into contact with the older races 
on its eastern and southern shores, and learned from them 
arts and crafts, customs and beliefs that quickened their 
development, exercised their energies, and fitted them to 
play their great part in the history of the world at a much 
earlier period than their brothers who had remained in 
central and northern Europe. This ethnical intercourse 
made them, too, different in character and in destiny from 
the brothers who had wandered into India, and had become 
there such potent factors of religion and change. Man's 
influence on man, therefore, is as powerful as ever was the 
influence of Nature to modify worship and belief. 

4. But history tends to modify religion even more than 
nature or ethnical relations. The longer man lives the 
stronger grows the power of the past over the present. 
For not only does memory become more crowded with 
images, but the images grow more defined and definite. 
Imagination comes to its aid, and the hero experiences 
apotheosis ; deity is made in the image of man, and an- 
thropomorphism enlarges the qualities and attributes of the 
divine. But the stage of culture at which the process of 
apotheosis begins, as well as the underlying idea of Deity 
in its relation to Nature and man, must also be taken into 
account as helping to determine the specific character of the 
religious ideal. Thus the notion of the Divine immanence 
was native to both the Hindu and Greek mind, but their 
respective pasts made a notable difference in the form it 
assumed. In India it was an immanence that was primarily 
one of nature and class, but in Greece an immanence in 
the man as a man. It was the Brahman who was to 
the Hindu the pre-eminent incarnation of his God, but in 
Greece it was the hero — the most manlike of men. Then, 
too, the stage of culture made itself apparent in the con- 



222 EARTH THE SHADOW OF HEAVEN 

struction of the Divine order. The Vedic mythology has 
been termed simultaneous, the Homeric successive, i.e. the 
Vedic deities stand together, independent, distinct, co- 
ordinate, but as it were uncombined and unsystematized ; 
while the Homeric deities are reduced to system, and a 
principle of subordination has been introduced which reflects 
Greek society and the State. In the Homeric mythology 
there is a fine harmony between the worlds of gods and of 
men ; neither is a reproach to the other, but each is wrought 
in the other's image. They do not differ in morals, lust, 
cruelty, love of friends, and hatred of enemies ; the duties of 
hospitality and friendship reign in heaven as on earth. Zeus 
and Hera have their jealousies, quarrels, and inconsistencies 
even as Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, though Olympus 
does not know a love so pure and invincible as Penelope's. 
In the councils of the gods the same infirmities of temper, 
the same swift and satirical speech, appear as in the assembly 
of the Greek chiefs. The gods, like so many hungry warriors, 
love the smell of fat beeves, and go where they can most 
enjoy it. They are as envious as even men themselves can 
be of the happy or the prosperous man. In the upper world, 
as upon the earth, the under world is feared ; and fate and 
death cast as thick a shadow upon Olympus as they do upon 
the homes of men. This complete anthropomorphization of 
the Greek god is the counterpart of the complete immanence 
of the idea of the divine in man ; while in the Hindu 
mythology the pre-eminent incarnation of deity in a class or 
the instruments of a class, results in a notion of the divine 
so little man-like as to be now brutal, now physical, but 
never as human and ethical as we know the Greek gods 
tended to become. 

5. But this action of history further shows itself in the in- 
fluence exercised by the social or political ideal on the notion 
of the divine. We have very different conceptions of Deity 
and his relations to man in societies that are organized on the 



THE SOCIETY OF GODS MANLIKE 223 

patriarchal or regal, and in those governed by the social or 
communal idea. Thus amid the Semitic tribes we have very 
early the patriarchate. The family is the natural unit of 
society and has at its head the father, who is the natural 
monarch. And we have in consequence two parallel pheno- 
mena : the most absolute sovereignty is ascribed to God and 
also to the king. This is connected with the notion of the 
Divine transcendence, which means that God is a Will above 
Nature, and not within it; just as the king is at once in being 
and will above the state, creative of it rather than incor- 
porated within it. On the other hand, amid the Aryan 
tribes of India the regal as well as the priestly class are 
conceived as evolved from the people ; they proceed from 
below upwards, or grow from within outwards rather than 
constitute the state by a transcendent and external will. 
The immanent notion and tendency which in thought 
created Pantheism built up a society which, in its very 
classes, grades, and functions, represented an inherent order. 
The social ideal of the tribal polity thus becomes the 
vehicle and symbol of the tribal theology. As a con- 
sequence the social and the religious worlds helped to 
organize each other ; the same idea was the architect of 
both religion and the state. 

6. But now as a special form of the historical influence 
qualifying the political and social, the action of great per- 
sonalities must be recognised. There is no region in which 
they are at once so powerless and so powerful — so powerless 
to annihilate or create, so powerful to modify or change. 
It does not lie with any human will to determine whether 
religion shall or shall not be ; it is so much a product and 
decree of Nature that it will be whatever any individual 
may desire or decide. But its quality or character, its 
opportunity, form, or line of development may be powerfully 
influenced by the direct or indirect action of persons. To 
illustrate this would be to write the history of almost all 



224 THE CREATIVE PERSONALITY 

religions ; but some remarkable phenomena may be simply 
noted. In religions which emphasize the immanent idea 
creative personalities have been rarer than in those which 
emphasize the transcendental. There is no land or people 
so steeped in religion as the Indian ; all their hopes and 
aspirations move in obedience to its will ; their literature has 
been made by it, their social order embodies it ; but the 
really remarkable thing is that, while the religious person, 
now as teacher, now as reformer, is everywhere in the history 
of India, the creative personality has but rarely appeared, 
and in a transcendent degree has appeared but once in 
its whole history. On the other hand, peoples with less of 
the genius for religion have had persons of vaster influence 
on the world's history. The small tribe of the Jews produced 
the prophets of Israel and the apostles of the Christian 
faith ; a small tribe in Arabia, shut off from cosmopolitan 
influences, produced Mohammed ; China, at a remote period 
in her life, produced Lao Tsze and Kung Fu Tsze ; ancient 
Persia had its great personality in Zoroaster. The reason 
at once of the more frequent emergence and the vital 
power of the creative personality in religions which are 
governed by the transcendental idea, may lie here — that 
they emphasize in so much higher a degree personal free- 
dom and will, while where immanence is so construed as 
to depersonalize deity he becomes the synonym for necessity 
both in man and in Nature. The things that are must be, 
and there is no power in man to change their course. On 
the other hand, the transcendental idea is an expression 
not of force but of will ; though all else may be necessitated, 
yet God is free. Hence, though in the popular judgment 
fatalism may mark Islam, yet it is not the fatalism of an 
inexorable mechanism or blind necessity, but of an irre- 
sistible will. Where God necessitates but is not necessitated, 
there must ever exist the possibility of personalities appear- 
ing which He creates and sends to accomplish large things 






HIS REASON AND CAUSE 225 

for religion ; where the cycle of life is a necessity tempered 
by the contingencies of a social or sacerdotal order, there is 
no room for the free personality and its creative and modify- 
ing work. 

These are a few of the factors of formal change in religion. 
But within the local there lives and moves what may be 
termed a universal Spirit, a life we may feel rather than 
analyze. God has never left Himself without a witness. He 
has manifested Himself to men ; has written His name in 
their hearts, and they have never ceased to be conscious of 
the name. The attempt to read it may have resulted in the 
strangest misreadings, in grotesque interpretations and appli- 
cations ; but from the name and the necessity of finding Him 
whose name it is, man has never been able, nor indeed has 
ever wished, to escape. And as the name is there, He who 
wrote it has never forgotten His own handiwork, and has 
moved in men and nations like the spirit which quickens the 
understanding. And now and then man becomes conscious 
of this quickening spirit, and a change passes over him ; a 
vision of higher ideals than the mean greeds and ambitions 
of his secular life possesses his soul. On such occasions a 
tidal wave of change sweeps over the face of humanity, and 
by some mystic method moves from east to west, or from north 
to south, over peoples who had never heard of each other's 
existence. In one century we may find great prophets in 
Israel, a great religious reformer in India and another in 
China, and all humanity moving to new religious impulses ; 
and there are seasons when one race seems to dominate all 
other races, to be for a season the master of the world, till, 
defeated by its very victories, it declines into a deeper obscurity 
than that- from which it had emerged. Where are the -skill 
and the wealth and the statesmanship of ancient Egypt ? 
where the military prowess of Assyria and Babylonia ? where 
the ethical passion and imperial ambitions of ancient Persia? 
where the art and poetry of Greece ? where the statesmanship 

P.C.R. 15 



226 DIVINE PURPOSE IN HISTORY 

and military discipline and genius of ancient Rome? And 
yet do they not all live in the men and peoples who are 
alive to-day, and alive in a manner impossible without these 
earlier states and peoples ? The ebb and flow in the life of 
humanity is a marvellous thing, and the special moment at 
which a man is born has, in relation to the great tides that 
mark the onward movement of society, a special and peculiar 
significance. And what do these things signify but that 
changes do not come unbidden, — that the inspiration of the 
Almighty is a factor in human destiny, and that the God 
who works in history fulfils Himself in many ways? 






CHAPTER VII 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 

B. The Historical Religions 

THE analyses and discussions conducted in the preceding 
chapter may be said to have introduced us to the 
problems co-ordinated under the terms " the Philosophy of 
Religion." What is so named may now be defined as the 
dialectical or reasoned interpretation of the consciousness of 
man as expressed in his religions and unfolded in their 
history. As such its function is to study mind in religion, in 
order that it may the better explain religion through mind. 
Now the mind it studies is a much more concrete and real 
object than the abstract mind which the metaphysician tries, 
speculatively, to read ; which the psychologist attempts, ex- 
perimentally, to observe and analyze ; and which the anthro- 
pologist, imaginatively, invites nature to insert or inscribe in 
bis primitive man. For history may be described as the 
incarnation or externalization of this mind, and the events 
or acts it records as the steps and process of its self- 
revelation. For though these acts may have been done 
by persons, yet the persons have not been isolated per- 
sonalities, but rather the concatenated and rational vehicles 
of a single and coherent power, which could operate in a 
multitude of forms without losing its essential unity. If, 
then, we conceive the languages, the literatures, the institu- 
tions, the laws, the societies, and the beliefs of peoples as 



228 AS SPEECH TO DIALECTS 

so much undesigned and spontaneous racial autobiography, 
it is evident that if these can be accurately interpreted 
they will enable us to live within the racial mind, and 
look at the world through its eyes. We have already 
argued that the problems of individual are one with those 
of collective experience ; but though they be identical, yet it 
is no paradox to say that they grow more rather than less 
capable of solution by being extended in scope and increased 
in complexity. For while the universe does not become a 
mystery to man till man has become a mystery to himself, 
yet, though he does not cease to be mysterious, he becomes a 
more intelligible mystery when viewed through the whole 
than when regarded as a separate and independent atom. 
The very fact that it is those immense idealisms which 
we call the religions that have been the main factors in the 
organization of society, speaks volumes as to the intrinsic 
quality of the spirit which we call human nature. 

We return, then, to the position, that there can be a 
philosophy of religion only when the religions are historically 
studied. Without history the philosophy would move as in 
a dream, attempting to grapple with the shadows of a world 
unrealized ; while without thought history would have no 
vision in its eyes, would find no reason in what it saw, 
would simply aggregate matter whose atoms were, singly, 
insignificant and, collectively, an unordered heap. We may 
say, then, in terms suggested by one of Kant's most famous 
dicta, the philosophy without the history is empty, the 
history without the philosophy is blind ; or, changing the 
figure for one more illuminative, the religions are like a 
multitude of dialects into which man's aboriginal speech 
or faculty of speech has broken. The concern of philosophy 
is with the speech, or the faculty that made the speech, 
for without it articulate and intelligible dialects could not 
have been. The concern of history is with the dialects, 
for without them speech could have had no actual or 



SO SPIRIT TO THE RELIGIONS 229 

continuous life. The universal is realized in and by the 
individual ; but the individual without the universal would 
be simply an uninterpretable unit. History, then, has to 
do with the religions as children of time and place, each 
with its own ancestry and kinships, its own accent and 
idiom, its own features and idiosyncrasies, its own antece- 
dents and environment ; but philosophy has to do with the 
causes which made all religion possible, and the conditions 
which turned the possible into actual religions. The two 
are thus necessary to a complete synthesis, for we can as 
little explain history by a method of isolation or individua- 
tion as we can interpret nature by a process of physical 
or metaphysical abstraction, which conceives force, but will 
not recognize any correlation of forces. Without the accu- 
rate knowledge of local forms, the character and behaviour 
of the universal cause could never be ascertained ; and 
without the investigation of roots and reasons, the enquiry 
into why things are what they are and why they behave 
as they do, research into local forms would lose almost 
all its scientific worth. But the more we seek for religion 
some root in reason, personal and collective, the less can 
we conceive any religion as void or vain, an irrational 
chance or mischance, which has come, no one knows whence^ 
to walk the earth with aimless feet and vanish, whither no 
one can tell. For if we hold with Bunsen that God, which 
is but another name for Reason, " and not the devil or his 
Punchinello — Accident — governs the world," ! then we must 
conclude that just as there is a divine thought in nature, so- 
there is a divine idea in the religions ; and could we find and 
express this idea, we should have the very vindication we 
most need of God's ways to men. 

1 Christianity and Mankind, vol. iii. p. 4. 



I 



230 UNIVERSAL EMPIRES DO NOT 

§ I. Religions as National and Missionary 

I. One of the most obvious and familiar classifications of 
the historical religions is into the local or national, and the 
universal or missionary. The local or national live within a 
defined geographical area, and are so bound up with the 
speech, the customs, the institutions, the special modes of 
thought, the social and political order of the particular 
peoples who inhabit it, that they could not exist apart from 
these conditions ; while they are at once jealous of all foreign 
intermeddling or intermixture and void of the ambition to 
become the faith of the alien. The universal religions, on 
the contrary, refuse to be limited by a land or people, by any 
special speech or local usage ; and are by nature expansive, 
seeking to comprehend man simply as man, and to live by 
being believed rather than merely observed. The local 
religions are an infinite multitude, while the universal are but 
three. Of these, two — Buddhism and Christianity — possess 
independently the missionary spirit ; but the third, Moham- 
medanism, derived its idea from the second. The first is the 
product of the Aryan, the second and third of the Semitic 
race. The antecedents of the first lie in a religion whose 
keynote is monism and the immanence of Deity ; the ante- 
cedents of the second, which are in a large degree also those 
of the third, lie in a religion whose keynote is monotheism 
and the transcendence of God. And each owes its special 
characteristics to the religion out of which it grew ; the 
features of the parent faith are visible in the face of its 
offspring. 

But this, like all obvious classifications, is neither accurate 
nor descriptive. For there are national religions that may be 
termed missionary, while no missionary religion either has 
been or can be independent of national forms and the service 
of particular nationalities. It may also be added that there 
are religions which have inspired universal empires, though 



BEGET UNIVERSAL RELIGIONS 231 

without becoming universal themselves. It is, indeed, one of 
the curious facts of history that dreams of universal empire 
are older and more common than the vision of a universal 
religion; and it is instructive as well as curious that the 
peoples who dreamed of empire were never possessed of the 
vision, while those who had the vision were untouched by the 
lust of secular power. Thus the Egyptian kings subdued 
and plundered their weaker neighbours in honour of Horus 
or of Amon Ra ; the mighty potentates of Mesopotamia 
conquered and enslaved states to the greater glory of Bel 
or Assur, Merodach or Nebo ; Persia overcame Assyria, 
Babylon, and Egypt, and invaded Greece in the name of 
her great god ; the Greek carried his language and his arts 
to farthest Ind, and the Roman legions bore the Roman 
eagles, and with them Roman law and order, throughout 
the civilized world. But these empires did not dream of 
establishing their religions where they imposed their wills. 
Their ambition was not to reign over mind and con- 
science, but simply to be sovereign in civil affairs. The 
peoples, indeed, were ready enough now to mock at alien 
deities, thus expressing their scorn or hatred of the states 
they defeated or were defeated by ; now to borrow or pro- 
pitiate them, and now to endow them with the names of 
their own gods ; now to imitate alien cults or turn them 
into mysteries which should do for the initiated what 
their national worship failed to accomplish. But the wisest 
of all the world-empires most scrupulously respected all the 
legal rights of the religions native to the regions it con- 
quered, and did not allow Jove to reign over any of the 
lands it governed. Instead the state itself underwent a 
species of apotheosis, the emperor became divus, and the 
citizens were, if not so tolerant, yet so devout as to naturalize 
in Rome the deities of other lands. And so it seems as if 
civil ambition were fatal to religious expansion, and to nurse 
a missionary empire were to cultivate a restricted faith. 



232 NATIONAL RELIGIONS MISSIONARY 

2. But it was said above that a national might also be 
a missionary religion. The ideas do not constitute a true 
antithesis, for a religion may spread by a process as well of 
absorption as of diffusion, i.e. a religion may so assume new 
families or tribes into itself as to outgrow its original limits, 
yet without departing from its original type and home. 
Thus Brahmanism is so intensely racial that it may well be 
described as the apotheosis of blood, or as the pride of race 
deified. There is no law so inexorable or so pitiless as 
the law of Caste ; it binds the Hindu peoples, even though 
split into a multitude of states, into a unity more absolute 
than the most imperious despotism has ever, or could ever 
anywhere have, achieved. The religion has not, indeed, any 
outlook beyond India ; it does not love the sea ; to cross it 
and mix with alien peoples is to lose caste ; it is sufficient 
for itself, does not seek to be known, has no wish that the 
foreigner should know it ; it told its meaning reluctantly, 
with many a protest that the secrets wrung from it were not 
its genuine and veritable mind, and that only the twice-born 
man could seek and know the truth. Yet, in spite of this 
deification of race, nay, perhaps because of it, Brahmanism is 
in India missionary to a degree and in a way that Islam is 
not. The latter has the strength and the severity of a system 
which has been knit together and forced into its place by 
a succession of imperious wills, creating a fanaticism as 
imperious as their own ; but the former lives and grows like 
an organism perfectly adapted to its environment — plastic, 
elastic, invincible as the waves which break against the rock 
only to return unwearied, increased in volume, massed into 
rhythmic ranks, to break unbroken again and yet again. 
And so Brahmanism grows irresistibly, absorbs tribes, steals 
into the jungles, creeps up the mountains, modifies the 
Mohammedan, assimilates the hill-man, ever enlarging its 
numbers, yet never leaving its home. And as in India so in 
China, where the ancestral religion may be described as the 



MISSIONARY RELIGIONS NATIONAL 233 

apotheosis of the family as distinguished from the race. 
Here, too, tribes have been absorbed, other cults and religions 
have been assimilated, the magic of Taoism has been allowed 
to stand beside the wisdom of Confucius, and the word and 
ritual of Buddha have supplemented the simple speech of 
both ; but the ancient customs still live, observed by hundreds 
of millions where once they were followed by tens. These 
religions are national, yet they are missionary ; though their 
increment comes by absorption, yet the absorbed are the 
converted, changed from heathen into children of the 
faith. 

3. But it is no less true that the most aggressively mis- 
sionary religion has a radius within which it lives most 
vigorously, races it commands and possesses most completely, 
and social or political conditions which it feels most con- 
genial to its spirit and most favourable to its growth. Thus 
Buddhism moves within a well-defined area, which it has 
never been able to break through or live beyond. It spread 
very early to southern India ; crossed the sea from Ceylon 
to Burma and Siam ; in the north it pierced the passes of 
the mighty Himalayas, and moved eastward to China and 
Japan. But the enthusiasm of its missionaries failed to 
touch the free and wandering tribes of Central Asia, or the 
cold and more rational mind of Persia, though both were 
destined a thousand years later to put their stiff necks 
under the yoke of the stern Arabian prophet. We may 
say, then, that Buddhism is a missionary, but not a uni- 
versal religion, — it is not even generically Asiatic, though 
specifically Oriental. Its intellectual basis and superstructure, 
the ethics it inculcates, the ideal of life it enjoins, and the 
type of society it would create or realize, are, while distinc- 
tive of the land of its birth and congenial to the peoples 
it has converted, yet so foreign and so offensive to the 
more strenuous Western mind that it could not persuade it 
to believe or awaken within it any sympathetic response. 



234 RELIGIONS OF EAST AND WEST 

And Western does not here mean European ; it means to 
the West of India, and includes races which gave to Asia its 
oldest civilization and its most masterful empires as well as 
its last and most aggressive religion. It was not its white 
face that made Europe insusceptible to the eloquence of the 
dusky Hindu, but it was what the Hindu preached. His 
word was a gospel to his own people, but a meaningless 
mystery to minds with another history and a different out- 
look on life. 

The missionary and universal features in Christianity will 
be discussed later ; but here it must be noted that it seems 
to the Orient as distinctively Occidental as the religions of 
India or China seem Oriental to us. We may argue that 
intellectually it is of no place or time ; that historically it is 
Asiatic in origin ; that its founders were Semites, its first 
preachers and earliest disciples Jews ; but this is to the 
Hindu or the Chinaman to speak antient history, not living 
fact. It comes to India from the land and in the speech of 
its conquerors ; to China in the ship and the raiment of the 
merchants who trade for gain, and who would for the sake 
of profit break up the most ancient civilization in the world. 
And it is not surprising that the peoples judge as they see, 
and hate because they so judge. It would be wonderful were 
it to be otherwise. Christianity comes to them speaking 
the tongue of Europe, thinking with its mind, baptized into 
its spirit, charged with its ambitions, — if not expounded, yet 
annotated, illustrated, and made lucid more by its soldiers, 
statesmen, merchants, and magistrates than by the mis- 
sionaries whose office it is to speak up for the religion. The 
Eastern peoples cannot see it because the Western sunlight 
that streams through it has got into their eyes. And so they 
feel its missionary spirit to be offensive ; it is part of the in- 
solence which marks the raw aggressiveness of the young 
and inexperienced West. They identify the religion with the 
people most active in its service, and think of it as only a 



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL 235 

national faith which European vanity has, simply because 
the faith is Europe's, mistaken for the world's. 

§ II. The Idea and the Institution in Religion 

1. It is evident, then, that our analysis must be carried 
farther back until we reach principles of differentiation at 
once simpler and more determinative than can be expressed 
by terms like local and universal, national and missionary. 
And here we begin by drawing a distinction : — to use 
national forms and to be served by particular nationalities 
is a very different thing from being either dependent on 
them or identical with them. If a religion were incapable 
of assuming a national or local form, it would be disqualified 
from doing any good to the nation ; but \if it were incapable 
of assuming any other form than this one, it would be unfit 
to be of service outside the particular nation, or simply to 
man as man. A universal religion may be described as one 
capable of being possessed by any people, but incapable of 
being the possession of any one people ; while the mark of 
a particular religion is fitness for one state or race and un- 
fitness for any other. The universal addresses man as 
man, is able to speak his many languages, adapt itself to 
his many stages of culture, live within his many environ- 
ments, — physical, intellectual, social, political, — even though 
it may be for the purpose of ultimately adjusting them to 
its own ideal ; but the local can use no more than one 
tongue, live within but one body, and flourish in only one 
environment. In other words, the universal emphasizes the 
substantive, the ideal, the essential ; while the local em- 
phasizes the formal, the external, what we may term the 
provincial accent and the dialectal idiom. Now, the analysis 
of religion into the subjective or causal elements, and the 
objective or caused, revealed certain possibilities of emphasis 
in actual religions : they may accentuate the ideas, the 
truths, the beliefs which constitute their reasonable soul ; or 



236 CUSTOM IN GREEK RELIGION 

they may accentuate the customs, the polity, the institutions, 
and usages which form their visible organism. Where the 
accent falls on the ideas and beliefs, the religion is more or 
less independent of place ; where the accent falls on customs 
and usages, the religion is local, the only expansion possible 
to it is through the growth or diffusion of the people, the 
caste, or the order whose institution it is. The mere change 
of accent from usage to belief does not indeed by itself 
distinguish a universal from a local religion ; that depends 
more on the quality of the ideas, the character of the 
ideals, and their power to command a suitable embodi- 
ment, personal and collective. The mere development of 
the intellectual contents of a national religion will not 
universalize it — may indeed dissolve it as custom without 
enlarging it as faith. Thus the action of Greek thought was 
as disintegrative of Greek religion as it was later re-integra- 
tive of the Christian. The ideals of the philosophical intellect 
and the realities of religious custom formed in Greece a 
contrast that soon became a conflict. What the religion was 
we know only in part. We have learned since Lobeck to 
think of the mysteries as shows or spectacles rather than as 
schools of secret wisdom ; but we forget that to see is also 
to learn, and that what is true of the mysteries is largely true 
of the cults as a whole : they were spectacles, though not 
always edifying spectacles. The student who studies Greek 
religion in literature or in art may with Hegel speak of it as 
the apotheosis of the beautiful ; but the man of cultivated 
reason and refined feeling who saw it as it lived, feared 
rather its power to deprave the passions and defile the 
imagination of the multitude. Of all the gods of antiquity 
the Greek were the most human : warriors and heroes, fathers 
and sons, husbands and brothers, magnified men all of them, 
no one immortal in his own right, pure by nature and good 
by choice. The poetry which describes their characters and 
lives was the only sacred history the people knew, yet to us 



AND REASON IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY 237 

it is the most secular poetry in all ancient literature. But 
the discovery made by philosophy, that the ideals of the 
reason were one with the ideas fundamental in religion, 
begot a sense which the worship of the temple and the 
mythology alike offended. With the vision that spared no 
illusion the Greek thinkers saw that two things were needful : 
religion must be saved by being purged from its coarser 
customs, and men must be got to think of the gods better 
than they thought of themselves. It was the necessity, yet 
impossibility, of doing these two things that forced the 
thought to dissolve the religion it could not refine. Yet what 
it failed to accomplish then it achieved later. The Greek 
thinkers bound once for all thought and belief, reason and 
deity, man's highest idea and his chief object of worship, 
indissolubly together. They made him feel that he could 
never think his best unless he thought worthily of his God, 
and that the truth which it was the function of the reason 
to seek was, when found, a law for the government of life. 
They coined terms that were to be used in building up a 
more universal theology than their own, and so evoked what 
we may term the religion latent in man as to make it 
the inalienable heritage of the race. To make a theology 
may be a smaller thing than to found a religion, but it is 
only through its theology that the religion can have any 
reality for the intellect or any authority for the conscience. 
Theologies apart from religion are but fields for the exercise 
of the speculative reason ; religions apart from theologies are 
but sensuous arts, the sanctioned amusements of the vulgar. 
Hence, though Greek thought dissolved the consuetudinary 
religion of Greece, yet by laying the basis of every future 
theology it performed a service so eminent that it deserves 
to be described as the contributory creator of a religion 
qualified, by the degree in which the Deity it worships is one 
with the highest ideal of the reason and the supreme law 
of the conscience, to be at once missionary and universal. 



238 OPPOSED ACTION OF CUSTOM 

2. But the principle which has just been stated involves 
another, its complement and counterpart : the religion that 
emphasizes the formal at the expense of the substantive 
element loses in moral quality just as it gains in local 
features or provincial character. Worship and belief stand 
to each other as language and thought ; as man thinks of 
Deity, so he worships, but it is from the worship, and not 
from the schools, that the multitudes learn what to think 
or believe concerning Him, as well as the terms on which 
He will accept their homage and consent to be their friend. 
But worship is precisely the point where man is most 
potent, where his fears, passions, impulses of hope and 
despair have freest play; and where he finds it therefore 
so much easier to accommodate the usages he follows to 
his own weakness than to make or keep them worthy of 
the majesty of God. The very desire to stand well with 
God, when he knows he ought not so to stand, leads man 
to the use of means for appeasement or propitiation con- 
gruous to his own nature, and so more or less ignoble ; and 
the use of the ignoble in worship by depraving the notion 
of Deity lowers both the man and the religion. As a 
simple matter of fact, which the scientific student of religions 
will be the last to dispute, the agencies which do most to 
deteriorate and demoralize, religion are the usages, the 
sacrifices and the offerings designed to reconcile man to 
God. As a rule, when man attempts to do the greatest 
offices, he tends to do them in a way which he himself feels 
to be agreeable, just as if he argued, What is pleasant to 
me must be acceptable to the Deity. And as his worship, 
like his word, is the incarnation of an idea, the idea it 
incarnates is his interpretation of God, the kind and quality 
of the Being he wishes to please, and the sort of things 
that are conceived to give Him pleasure. A purely specu- 
lative idea of Deity does not constitute a religion; it is 
constituted by the idea which is realized in the worship, and 



AND OF THOUGHT IN RELIGION 239 

is by it judged or redeemed. Thus the speculative idea 
of ancient Egypt was refined and even noble : the ethics in 
the Book of the Dead are perhaps the most exalted ethics 
in ancient religion ; but the worship of the ox, the ape, 
the cat, the crocodile, and similar beasts, with all the bestial 
ministrations it involved, stamped the religion with a char- 
acter and made it exercise an influence which suited its 
worship rather than its speculative idea or its theoretical 
ethics. Greek thought laboured hard to redeem Greek 
religion from the worship that depraved it, but it laboured 
in vain. Xenophanes reproached Homer and Hesiod for 
attributing to the gods things men held to be dishonourable 
and disgraceful. Herakleitos condemned the men who 
prayed to images, or sang the shameful phallic hymns to 
Dionysos, and the priests, priestesses, and mystery-mongers 
who traded on men's fears. Plato described the popular 
mythology as " lies and bad lies," and proposed to blot out 
of Homer the stories that did not become the good, the 
images, acts and indecencies, unseemly in all, but most of 
all unseemly in Deity, which appealed to the more ignoble 
qualities in men — -the fear of death, contempt of virtue, lust, 
irreverence, hate, treachery, cowardice, insensibility to the 
true and the beautiful. The Stoic, who consciously lived 
under the reign of an ethical ideal, tried to get rid of the 
immoralities in the popular beliefs, which the worship 
articulated, by allegorizing the mythology, turning it into 
an elaborate and finely articulated parable in which the 
ancients had stored their wisdom and out of which the 
moderns were to draw it like honey from the honeycomb. 
And did not the greatest of the Epicureans, the Roman 
Lucretius, because he so loved beauty and truth, hate re- 
ligion, which had so much power to terrorize and deprave, 
but none to elevate and ennoble, and which could only 
lower with baleful eyes from the four quarters of the 
heavens upon the unhappy race of mortals ? And as with 



240 GOD AS DETERMINATIVE IDEA 

ancient Egypt and Greece, so with modern India. There 
are Brahmans who think high thoughts, and dream sublime 
dreams, and conceive Deity as pure Being, whom to know is 
highest bliss. But they do not represent the religion which 
is known as Hinduism ; with it their Supreme has only the 
remotest speculative concern. The god who is worshipped in 
the temple is not the Brahma of thought ; but it is the wild 
and furious Kali, or the mighty and excited yet ascetic Siva, 
or the golden-haired and swift-moving and gracious Vishnu, 
or Krishna of the many loves and the invincible life, and the 
multitude of similar deities that the pujari waits on and the 
people pray to and praise. And the worship is as the gods 
are, and the religion is as the worship and the gods. The 
idea that does not penetrate, purify, and command these 
may be an object of thought, but is no part of religion ; the 
religion which does not absorb the highest thought, at once 
refining it and refined by it, is divorced from reason and 
morals, and has ceased to guide and inspire man's better life. 
It may continue a worship or a usage, but it has ceased to 
be in the true and proper sense a religion. 

§ III. The Idea of God in Religion 
A. Buddhism 

I. The ultimate principle, then, which determines the 
character and quality of a religion, is the object it worships, 
or, to use the old simple and concrete term, its idea of God. 
Worship is essentially an act and process of reciprocity, a 
giving and a receiving ; in it man surrenders himself to God, 
that God may communicate of His grace to man and realize 
in him His will. But this reciprocity signifies that each term 
of the relation is a person, each conscious of the other, each 
seeking to find and know the other. On the one side is the 
person who admires and adores and implores ; on the other 
side is the Person who can see the speaker, hear his voice, 



NO RELIGION A PANTHEISM 241 

and respond to his appeals. Hence no impersonal Being 
whether named fate or chance, necessity or existence, the 
soul or the whole, can be an object of worship, though it may 
be an object of thought. As a matter of historical fact no 
religion has ever been a pantheism, nor has any pantheism 
ever constituted a religion. The Hindu philosophies, for 
example — and this is especially true of the Vedanta — are just 
as much and just as little a religion as are the speculations 
of Plato and Plotinus, of Spinoza and Jacob Boehme. They 
are of the nature of afterthoughts, hypotheses to account for 
things as they are, to be studied and criticised as products 
of the logical intellect rather than of the spontaneous and 
inspired reason. Pantheism, in all its forms, is on its ideal 
side the deification of the actual, or the apotheosis of what is, 
and its ultimate truth is the right of all that is, whatever it is, 
to be. Hence it can be quite consistently used to vindicate 
the most multitudinous polytheism as well as the grossest 
cults ; but what it cannot do is to take the place of any one 
of the gods or cults it vindicates, and by inviting worship 
become a religion. The impersonal must be personalized 
before thought, which is a subjective activity, can pass into 
worship, which is a reciprocal action, or a process of converse 
and intercourse between living minds. But we cannot say 
of monotheism what has been said of pantheism ; on the 
contrary, it was a religion before it became a philosophy, and 
its speculative problems and perplexities grew out of its 
power as a religious faith. The notion of a single and 
supreme God obviously involves a single religion, and so 
cannot be used to justify either a multitude of deities, or the 
legitimacy of their worship, or the existence of an actual 
which is in conflict with its ideal, the holy and gracious 
character of a God who must be personal to be worshipped, 
but who can be most easily conceived by having all His 
personal qualities translated into empty logical abstractions. 
And so monotheism has a much harder intellectual problem 
PC.R. 16 



242 WHETHER BUDDHISM IS ATHEISTIC 

than pantheism, but it has a higher religious value and 
greater ethical force. For since what is does not satisfy it, 
it feels bound by obedience to the Supreme Will to create 
what ought to be. The historical significance of this idea for 
religion is, therefore, the question we have next to discuss. 

2. But before we can proceed we must deal with a curious 
fact which may seem to invalidate both our argument and 
the conclusion which has been stated as the premiss of the 
new discussion : there are, as we have seen, two original 
missionary religions, and of these the one knows no God, 
while the other knows no God but One. Buddhism has been 
cited as an illustration of how a highly and potently ethical 
faith can exist not only without a personal God, but even 
without any deity whatever. Such citation, however, is 
essentially incorrect ; for nothing could be farther than the 
soul or system of the Buddha from what we mean by 
atheism. He indeed denied both the pantheistic and the 
polytheistic Brahmanisms of his day, with the authority of the 
sacred books on which they were based, the social distinctions 
by which they were justified, and the customs by which they 
were guarded and enforced ; but to turn this denial into the 
affirmation of an atheism is a feat of the most inconsequent 
logic. We maintain, on the contrary, that his denial was the 
expression of a thoroughly theistic consciousness. Buddha's 
relation to the thought and religion of his time has been 
already sketched. 1 He desired to escape from its unethical 
metaphysics and sensuous worship, and to come face to face 
with the moral realities of existence and life. This he did 
by insisting that a Supreme Soul which had no direct and 
helpful relation to the millions of souls that sorrowed, was 
but a supreme deceit ; that gods who were void of moral 
qualities were but empty names ; that a priesthood which 
did but observe ceremonies, perform sacrifices, or cultivate a 
self-regarding asceticism, and did , not teach men who were 
1 Ante, pp. 118-121. 






THE MORAL ORDER IS GOD 243 

dying in ignorance, was but a master of make-believe ; and 
that such a social system as caste was derogatory to the 
dignity of man, the harmony of society, and the end of 
existence. And so he became a preacher, persuading men 
to believe as he did ; he praised virtue, practised charity and 
chastity, lived as one who had discovered that goodness was 
the secret of life and that its end was to be holy, and he 
showed men how to associate for its attainment. He could 
not free himself from the sub-conscious mind of his people ; 
he thought as they did, used their logic to disprove their 
formulated principles, and to substitute for their egoistic 
metaphysics the noblest dream of altruistic ethics which ever 
broke upon the Oriental spirit. And if the idea of a sovereign 
moral order, too inexorable to allow the evil-doer to escape 
out of its hands and too incorruptible to be bribed by 
sacrifices into connivance at sin, be a theistic idea, then 
Buddha was a transcendent theist. But his people could not 
stand where he did ; his philosophy could not become a 
religion without a person to be worshipped, and they, by a 
sublime inconsistency of logic, rose in the region of the 
imagination and the heart to a higher consistency, and deified 
the denier of the Divine. Buddhism, then, may be described 
as the apotheosis of the ethical personality, an apotheosis 
spontaneous and imaginative rather than rational and logical. 
It could not be justified by the reason, but it was a vivid 
reality to faith. The deification was none the less complete 
that the religion knew no God, though it was a result that at 
once paralyzed the intellect and quickened and satisfied the 
heart. For on the speculative side Buddha was an anomaly 
in the universe, stood where no being could have been con- 
ceived as able to stand, invested with higher ethical attributes 
and enshrined in more reverent honour than India had ever 
ascribed to any deity, yet without having any of the physical 
qualities or functions which belong to a divine Being. But 
on the religious side devotion embalmed him in the richest 



244 MONOTHEISM AS A TRIBAL CULT 

and sweetest mythology known to man. Tales of his infinite 
tenderness became the soul of his religion, which lived not by 
the worship of his relics, or by meditation on the four sublime 
truths, or by the many attempts to stumble into the noble 
eightfold path, or by the subtle disputations of the doctors, 
but by the faith that he who impersonated its ideal was a 
person who had spoken, who could hear speech, and who 
would himself yet return to accomplish what was further 
needed for the complete saving of man. 



§ IV. The Idea of God in Religion 

B. Hebraic Monotheism 

I. We turn now to the question raised by the action of 
monotheism. What is here cardinal is the fact that it 
appeared as a belief creating a religion, not as a rational idea 
constituting a philosophy. And this means that while it 
rose amid a people to whom the transcendental idea was 
native, 1 it began to live, not as a speculative principle, 
but as a belief surcharged, as it were, with personality. 
It had none of the qualities of an intellectual concept, 
did not define or deny, but simply affirmed, as of a definite 
person, " The God of the people is a living God, and acts, 
loves, hates, thinks, wills as a Being must who has made 
a nation His special concern and care." And here another 
cardinal fact has to be recognized, that the belief, unlike 
a reasoned philosophical idea, had to be incorporated in 
local and social forms ; that these could not be other than 
ancient and ethnical ; and that therefore it could not fail 
to be governed in its life and growth more by these con- 
suetudinary forms than by speculative or dialectical forces. 
In other words, in a world where all religions were only 
local and tribal cults, it was only as such a cult that mono- 

1 Ante, pp. 217-219. 



LIVED IN A LOCAL MEDIUM 245 

theism could begin to be ; and the only form in which 
it could be held by men who were neither speculative nor 
logical thinkers, but only sons of the desert, in conscious- 
ness incoherent, confused though convinced in mind, was 
as a belief in the superiority and sufficiency of their God, 
not as an articulated notion which denied reality to all 
other gods. 

In itself, as handled by analytic thought, the belief signified 
that ideas which transcended the tribe or nation had come 
into existence ; and that in due season, by the sheer pressure 
of its immanent logic, the ancient and hitherto invariable 
association of God with a particular people and its special 
forms of worship would cease. But as a matter of fact the 
belief had to live as an expansive and expulsive power 
within a twofold rigorously limiting medium ; first, a tribal 
consciousness of colossal egoism ; and, secondly, the institu- 
tions and customs of the tribe. The humane force in Greece 
was culture, or the thought which so interpreted nature as 
to refine man ; the humane force in Israel was faith, or 
God so interpreted as to be incapable of restriction to 
any people or place. Culture was personal, and so in- 
dependent of the customs it disliked or the laws it criticized ; 
faith was collective, could become worship only by becoming 
social, and so stooping to tribal usages. Thus the idea 
which the faith expressed the polity tended to restrict, if 
not to deny. The impossibility of either surrendering or 
realizing his religious ideal is the tragedy in the history of 
Israel. The very majesty of the ideal waked the fanaticism 
of the tribe, and begot the consciousness that it had a 
treasure too singular and sublime to be entrusted to the 
hands of any other people. In theory Jehovah was the God 
of the whole earth, but in fact He was the God of the Jews 
only ; and to share in His grace and covenant other peoples 
must become Jews, it was not enough that they should be 
men. 



246 MONOTHEISM AND THE MYTHOLOGIES 

2. But even under these conditions, or possibly all the 
more because of them, the monotheistic idea revealed its 
intrinsic character. We may study its action first in the 
attitude of Hebrew thought to man and history. If we 
examine the conception which underlies the structure and 
narratives of the Old Testament, we shall find, as the peculiar 
and characteristic creation of the theistic idea, what we may 
without extravagance name a philosophy of history and 
of religion. The similarities of the Hebrew narratives of 
creation to the Chaldaean mythologies, with their days and 
stages of creation, the chaos and the void which preceded it, 
the division of the waters, of the darkness and the light, 
with the order in which the successive organisms appear, the 
coming of man and the dawn of the Sabbath, are too well 
known to call for either exposition or remark ; but the genius 
of Israel contributes the idea which turns the mythical into 
a rational process, and which entitles his race to the praise 
Aristotle accorded to Anaxagoras : he walks amid the 
ancient peoples like a sober man among drunkards. We 
start with a beginning in which God is ; He is the only 
uncaused Being ; the vision that would pierce the eternal past 
sees Him alone, and beside Him stands no second ; and His 
creative methods are those of the thinker rather than of the 
mechanic or artificer, and are as remote as possible from 
the monstrosities of the mythical cosmogonies, whether 
Babylonian or Greek. He speaks, and His language is 
nature ; He commands, and the personalized forces obey His 
word. His spirit moves upon the face of the waters ; He 
breathes into man the breath of life. And His relation to 
the creature is no less remarkable. Since man is His breath, 
he is His kin, with a dependent being, yet with an independ- 
ence of will which fits him to hold fellowship with the God 
who made him. This dignity, which he can keep only by 
obedience, he receives but to lose ; for on the very morrow of 
the creation, which, as it left God's hand, was so good, evil 






HISTORY OF MAN AND RELIGION 247 

enters because man, who had been made so much greater 
than he knew, was by his very innocence and inexperience 
so open to its enticements. 

And from this point onwards the marvellous segregative 
and organizing faculty of the monotheistic idea shows itself 
with growing distinctness. The material it deals with is old, 
traditional or borrowed, expressing the common knowledge 
or beliefs of Israel and the cognate peoples ; but the idea so 
acts as to build it into a new structure with a new life. Evil 
becomes the opponent without being the counterpart of God, 
and works against Him through man, in whom it becomes 
impersonated, while He works against it in man and in the 
course of his history. And here we meet in an implicit 
and more profound form the question so familiar to certain 
schools of Greek thought as to the origin of religion. Man 
has been so made that religion is native to him ; but he has 
so acted that a multitude of religions have come to be. The 
instinct to worship springs from the nature he owes to the 
Creator ; but the impulse to imagine counterfeit deities comes 
from the evil which desires a God lenient to sin. Man 
cannot escape his destiny, he must be religious ; yet even 
in being what he must he indulges his self-will, and by 
multiplying religions grows alien from the truth. But man's 
misbehaviour does not relieve the Creator from responsibility 
for His handiwork ; nay, it has rather increased it, and so 
sin is met by punishment. The guilty race perishes in the 
waters of the flood ; but, as if to show that destruction in no 
cure, the saved family, the moment it touches the earth, again 
betakes itself to sinning. Since the severest and most exem- 
plary penalties, so far from acting as deterrents, seem only to 
encourage evil to return as an unvanquished and mocking 
power, discipline is tried instead. If men will not retain 
God in their knowledge, He will neither accept their depraved 
ignorance nor abandon them to it. And so a people is 
chosen, and by special methods trained as the vehicle of His 



248 JEHOVAH TRANSCENDS ISRAEL 

truth, that in them "all the nations of the earth may be 
blessed." In the literature this universalism within the 
election is never lost sight of; the people are not allowed 
to think themselves an end, God is not restricted to their 
borders, but in the Law a hedge is set round them that His 
name may be preserved for all mankind. The forms used to 
express this idea are as graphic as they are naive. The man 
who appears as priest of the Most High God, blessing the 
father of the faithful and receiving tithes of him, does not 
belong to the selected family. 1 The forsaken bondwoman 
and her son are seen and specially cared for in the desert by 
the God of Abraham, who thus knows Ishmael as well as 
Isaac. 2 The " perfect man, who fears God and eschews evil," 
dwells not in Judaea, but in the land of Uz. 3 The anointed 
minister of His will is a heathen king, a Persian. 4 Out of the 
East comes a queen to admire the wisdom of Solomon. 5 In 
one prophetic vision all nations are seen bowing down to 
serve Him ; 6 in another all empires, even those most violently 
opposed to His kingdom, are made to be the ministers of His 
will. 7 And these universal elements persist in the face of the 
rigorous tribal consciousness which ever tended to conceive 
God as Israel's rather than Israel as God's. 

3. But still more instructive than the thought which applies 
the monotheistic idea to man and history is its action within 
the religion. Here there is a twofold movement, one which 
is proper to the idea itself, its immanent growth or personal 
history ; and one which belongs to the worship and institu- 
tions in which the collective consciousness laboured to 
incorporate and realize it. 

(a) The history of the idea shows its progressive ameliora- 
tion and expansion, the coincident growth of higher moral 

1 Gen. xiv. 18-20 ; cf. Ps. ex. 4 ; Heb. v. 6, 10 ; vii. 1-10. 

2 Gen. xvi. 10-13 ; xxi. 12-20. 8 Job i. 1. 

4 Isa. xliv. 28 ; xlv. 1. B 1 Kings x. i-io. 

6 Isa. lix.-lxi., Ixv. "' Dan. vii. 



BECOMES ETHICAL IN CHARACTER 249 

qualities, and a wider and more sovereign universalism. At 
first strength or power and God are nearly equivalents. 
His names speak of might, of a force that can be neither 
exhausted nor resisted ; and while He is so conceived He 
is but the strongest — and therefore the most majestic and 
awful — of the gods, who has selected a people for Himself. 
Since He has chosen Israel He cannot brook a rival ; He is 
a jealous God, towards the faithful pitiful and slow to anger, 
but terrible to the faithless. Yet even in early times His 
moral quality appears ; at the heart of the Mosaic legislation 
there stands a moral idea or law which governs His relations 
to His people and His people's to Him. These relations are 
conditional and not absolute ; God can be theirs, and they 
can be His only as they believe and obey, and their obedi- 
ence is to be personal and ethical, not simply collective and 
ceremonial. This was a wonderful innovation in religion, a 
thing so new and so strange that its significance and its 
possibilities were by no means obvious to those who saw it 
made. But this was only the beginning of change ; the 
longer the people knew God and the better they served, the 
more they loved and revered Him. He had called them out 
of Egypt, founded their state, which stood in His strength 
rather than in its own. On this act He would not go back, 
for was He not faithful, bound by His acts, bound by His 
promises, though acts and promises alike implied that His 
people should be as faithful as He? But this strong and 
sovereign and faithful God was also tender and compas- 
sionate : had He not married Himself to Israel, and would 
He not be true to His vows even when Israel erred, and be 
patient, forbearing, forgiving, even as a noble husband to a 
faithless wife ? But there was a nearer and a higher thought : 
the Maker was the Father ; and though his child might rebel, 
yet would He not forget the fruit of His loins. And if He 
was a God of this order, did He not dwell apart from all 
gods, and from all frail and feeble creatures, holy in nature 



250 MAN HOLY AS GOD IS HOLY 

and in name ? But the more moral He was conceived to be, 
the more moral man had to become in order to please Him. 
It was not enough that He should be honoured by fasts and 
festivals, by sacrifices and oblations, as were the gods of the 
Gentiles. What He required of man was justice, mercy, 
humility, purity of hands and heart ; the only service fit for a 
holy God was the service of holy men. Hence the worship 
of the Good by the good was the only worship He could 
approve. And at this point the evolution of the idea intro- 
duced into the religion a twofold change ; first, Jehovah 
ceased to be regarded by the great teachers as the God of 
one people, bound to them by peculiar ties of word and deed,, 
and He came to be conceived as the God of the pious man 
everywhere, sought and worshipped by him, loving the search 
and approving the worship ; and, secondly, He was to be 
recognised in a hitherto unknown degree as the God of the 
individual, the hearer of his prayer, the comforter of his life, 
the object of his faith, and the hope of his salvation. And 
these were not opposed, but concordant tendencies, for what 
is most universal must be open to every individual, and what 
every person may appropriate must be accessible to all. The 
books which express these ideas are the sublimest, not only 
in Hebrew, but in all sacred literature. The great prophets 
of the captivity and the return, especially Jeremiah and the 
later Isaiah, express the monotheistic as a collective yet 
ethical faith, opening its arms to all the reverent, blessing all 
the obedient. And the Book of Psalms is the voice of the 
monotheistic faith as a personal religion, seeking with a 
passion that will not be denied the God who is the light and 
life of the soul. It needs Him in its joy and in its sorrow,, 
in the face of death and in the midst of strife, when it goes 
to the house of God in goodly company, and when it pines 
alone, forsaken of all the men it trusted ; when it dwells in 
the besieged city or watches on the lone plain the flocks by 
night, when it is uplifted by being cast down into the depth 



THE TRIBAL INSTINCT IN WORSHIP 251 

or humbled by being allowed to go its own way to disaster 
and shame ; but, above all, it needs Him when it has sinned 
against Him, and can only ask that He would, according to 
the multitude of His tender mercies, blot out its transgres- 
sions. The Psalter is a great Book of Religion ; it shows that 
devotion is most sublime when it is most personal, that the 
man who has never stood with his soul uncovered before 
God has never worshipped, or tasted the ecstasy of one who, 
though a mortal, has lost all sense of mortality by feeling 
round him the everlasting arms. The literature that can 
plant so majestic a life in the soul may well be known as 
the sacred Book of Monotheism. 

(/3) When we turn from the idea to the institutions, or the 
worship by which God was to be approached, and in which 
He was to be served, we come upon a history with a very 
different moral. Here we find the tribal consciousness at 
work, seeking to restrict God to Israel, to fix the terms on 
which the Gentile should be allowed to participate in His 
grace. It is a sad story, all the sadder because through so 
many ages the Christian read the Jew's legislation with the 
Jew's eyes and in his sense. But now that our eyes are 
opened we can see, as Stephen and as Paul saw, the strenuous 
labour of the Jew, running through many centuries, to limit 
the Holy One to his tribe. The institutions, which were the 
organism of worship, if not in intention yet in fact and in 
effect, contradicted and cancelled the monotheism which 
was the intellectual and moral soul of the religion. To say 
this is not to undervalue the ethical ideas that under- 
lie the ritual. The people elected to serve God must be 
worthy of the God they serve. " Be ye holy, for I am 
holy," is the maxim on which their worship is founded. The 
people who are God's priests to mankind must be clothed 
in the beautiful garments of the priesthood. The idea is 
excellent, provided the symbolical sense be not forgotten ; 
but here as everywhere the tribal instinct translated the 



252 THE SOLE SOVEREIGN GOD 

symbols into substance. And as the ethical was lost in the 
ceremonial, the universal died in the particular. The more 
sharply the national consciousness expressed itself in national 
institutions, the more emphatically were tribal limitations 
placed upon the religion. The more they made the law they 
enacted the law of God, the less could they allow peoples 
who had not the law any share in their God. By building 
the temple they localized the worship of Him who knew no 
place ; by drawing tighter the terms of the covenant, they 
confined to themselves the Father who loved every people ; 
by forming an hereditary priesthood they attached His ser- 
vice to one family ; by elaborating their ceremonies, they 
shut religion within the ritual which they alone possessed, 
though even here the ethical sovereignty which could not be 
denied to Jehovah made Him broader than their law. The 
writer of most significance here is Ezekiel, who is priest as 
well as prophet, and who stands between the Deuteronomic 
legislation on the one hand, and the Levitical on the other. 
Jehovah is to him pre-eminently the God of Israel and they 
are his people. 1 He makes with them an everlasting cove- 
nant, sets His temple in their midst, and dwells in their land. 2 
The priests, like himself sons of Zadok, are the ministers 
who enter the sanctuary and approach God for the people ; 3 
and their independence is to be secured by a gift of land 
which is to be " holy," the portion of the priests, the ministers 
of the sanctuary * whose revenues are thus assured that they 
themselves, with their offices and rites, may be protected from 
princes and people. Ritual offences are grievous sins ; and 
though he holds the individual responsible, yet the real unit 
before God is the nation, and the only goodness the nation 
can know or manifest is conformity to some external law. 
Hence Ezekiel represented the tendency that would restrict 
God to a particular place or definite temple, His ministry to 
a specific priesthood, His worship to special forms, and His 
1 xxxiv. 30. 2 xxxvii. 26-28. 3 xliv. 15, 16. *xlv. 3-8. 






AND HIS PECULIAR PEOPLE 253 

servants to a peculiar people. The higher and- more spiritual 
prophets struggled indeed to emancipate the religion from 
this tribal particularism, but they struggled in vain. They 
saw the impure idolatries which corrupted the nations ; they 
described with passion and splendid irony the idol which the 
smith made and the carpenter fastened in his place, and the 
people bowed down before and called upon as their god ; 
and over against it they placed the Eternal, the unmade 
Maker, who formed the light, who formed the darkness, who 
overthrew kings and set up kingdoms, who fainted not and 
never was weary, and they bade all states to come and 
worship Him. But their ideal remained a prophetic vision ; 
it never became a reality. The real that was they hated only 
less than the heathen worships, if indeed they hated it less. 
For in the region of realized things the fanaticism of the 
tribe was mightier than the inspiration of the prophet. It is 
one of the supreme ironies of history that the last century 
in which the monotheistic people existed as a nation was 
also the period of their most frenzied particularism. In the 
heated imagination of the tribe the vessel became more 
infinitely precious than the treasure it carried. 

§ V. Judaism at Home and in the Dispersion 

I. But what Israel at home failed to do, the Israel of the 
dispersion more nearly accomplished. The men who escaped 
in some measure from the tribal institutions escaped also in 
the same degree from the tribal consciousness ; and so could 
look at religion in the light of their universal theism rather 
than through the shadows cast by local cults and customs. 
Of the kingdoms that sprang from the empire of Alexander, 
two had dealings with Israel : the Syrian oppressed him at 
home, the Egyptian protected him abroad. The Seleucid 
kings so tyrannized over the elect people, so insulted their 
faith and worship, as to provoke the Maccabaean revolt ; and 



254 HOW GREEK LIFE AND THOUGHT 

in the war for freedom religion became the symbol of the 
patriot and the seal of civil independence. As a consequence 
the tribal and the religious consciousness became more 
deeply interfused, the religious gave to the tribal its exalta- 
tion and its sanction ; while the tribal defined, narrowed, and 
embittered the religious. But the Ptolemies, by befriending 
the Jews, who had by settling in their opulent cities increased 
their wealth and enhanced their importance, evoked a temper 
quick to admire the different and to assimilate the foreign. 
And the amelioration was most marked in the region of faith, 
for the immigrants soon discovered that even as regards 
religion the Gentiles could teach the Jews as well as learn 
from them. The very attempt to interpret their religion 
for the foreigner, interpreted it into a new and larger faith 
for themselves. The Scriptures were translated out of the 
Hebrew into the Greek tongue, and so became international 
or even cosmopolitan, a book for Gentiles as well as Jews. 
Then translation did not leave the matter unchanged ; sacred 
history and discourse, read in the medium of a literary and 
philosophical language, not only lost much of their old 
simplicity and many of their old associations, but also gained 
with their new forms new associations and a new sense. The 
Jew who knew Greek but did not know Hebrew read his 
Scriptures more as a Hellenist than as a Rabbi ; the tradi- 
tions of the great synagogue fell from him, and the canons, 
critical and exegetical, of the Alexandrian schools took their 
place. With the knowledge of Greek came also the know- 
ledge of another order of religious thought. To hear Moses 
and Plato, Jeremiah and Zeno, Isaiah and Euripides speak 
in the same tongue was rather to realize their kinship than to 
feel their difference. And there began to dawn upon the 
students of Alexandria what had been hidden from the 
patriots of Judaea, that the vision of Deity had been known to 
Greece as well as to Israel. The Attic sage and the Hebrew 
seer were of one spirit, fulfilled like functions, were inspired 



MADE HEBRAISM HELLENISTIC 255 

and instructed by the same God. The method of allegorical 
interpretation which the Greek had used to reduce his 
mythology to literary decency and philosophical wisdom, the 
Jew used to turn his sacred history into a theology ; the 
creation, Eden, the fall, our first parents, the patriarchs and 
their acts, were all subjected to the metamorphic process 
which had expelled violence from Homer and reduced to 
respectability the most lascivious of the gods. But the 
theistic idea suffered the most significant modification. The 
Greek Logos was allowed to break into the stern solitude of 
the Hebrew Deity. It stood between Him and the world, 
separated Him from its evil and grossness, and relieved it 
from the oppressive weight of His almighty hand. The 
Logos was the intelligible which He had thought into being ; 
but it was also the architect who had realized the actual. 
The All-holy did not stand face to face with the material and 
sensuous, but He saw them, if He could be said to see them 
at all, through the medium of His beloved Word. And this 
mediated relation allowed a kindlier attitude to man and his 
religions. They were studied not through the divisive pro- 
perties of law and custom, but through the affinities of 
imagination and thought. The speech which had interpreted 
the religion made the religion more just to all who had used 
the speech. Greece as well as Judaea had known the true 
God ; in the one as certainly as in the other the Logos had 
been active ; men through contemplation of His beauty had 
learned to obey His will. And so a conclusion was reached 
which we may thus express : Where the thought is the same 
the religions may be distinct, but cannot be different, for the 
God who made the intelligible made all intellects akin to 
each other and to Him ; and it is through the knowledge of 
the truth that He is most truly known, and in its contem- 
plation that He is most purely worshipped. 

What Judaism represents, then, is the issue of the conflict 
between the universal idea and the local cult as embodied 



256 JUDAISM AS VICTORY OF THE CULT 

in the localized race. Where the cult had behind it the 
traditions, the associations, and the patriotism of the home it 
proved stronger than the idea, imposing upon God, who was 
theoretically one and alone and supreme, the limitations of a 
tribal worship ; but where the idea was emancipated from 
those domestic and ancestral associations, it tended to prove 
itself stronger than the cult. The triumph of the cult meant 
the nationalization of the religion, which would then be an 
abortive or unrealized monotheism ; but the triumph of the 
idea meant the universalization of the religion, which could 
only become an absolute monotheism by the worship being 
loosed from the bonds of the tribe and realized in humaner 
forms. And the form which the process assumed in the dis- 
persion was the modification of the religion into a system of 
philosophy, whose notes were eclecticism in thought and syn- 
cretism in worship. But the necessity of the situation was the 
consistency of idea and form, the homogeneity of the worship, 
the worshipper, and the God. And this homogeneity no 
syncretism has ever realized. Hence came a conflict which 
was not incidental, but essential ; for it grew out of the imperi- 
ous demand of the only thoroughly universal idea which had 
risen in the history of religion for a medium which should do 
justice to its universalism. In the nature of the case this 
could not be found in the institutions which were the symbols 
of national existence, as they were the creations of the tribal 
or national consciousness. To speak of the Jewish law and 
worship in these terms is to characterize, but not to depre- 
ciate, them. The universal idea could come into the thought 
and faith of humanity only through special persons, and such 
persons could be born and nursed only by a special people. 
The fitness of Israel to be the foster parent of such an idea 
does not lie open to question ; it is writ large on the whole 
face of his history and of man's. He lived for his idea ; his 
loyalty to it resisted all the absorbent forces of the ancient 
empires, and though the mightiest empire of them all broke 



YET AS VEHICLE OF THE IDEA 257 

up his state and threw his homeless members broadcast upon 
the world, yet the dispersed units have defied the assimilative 
energy of all modern peoples. And we may add that that 
energy has been inspired by every passion — hate, fear, greed, 
revenge, disdain, indifference, toleration, love of freedom in 
the abstract rather than of concrete men — by everything, in- 
deed, save the only thing that could have helped and healed, 
viz., sympathy and appreciation. Such a people was the very 
medium needed for the birth and breeding, the nurture and 
development of an idea which man so required, and yet was 
so averse to receive ; but the idea which could be begotten 
and nursed only by such a people could not continue their 
perennial possession. And the pathos of Israel's position 
lies in their invincible devotion to the national form of a 
belief which, in order that it might realize itself and become 
man's, required to lose all trace of its national origin and 
tribal history and live in a medium as universal as its nature 
and function. Whether such a medium has been found is 
a question which has yet to be discussed. 



P.C.R. 17 



CHAPTER VIII 

FOUNDED RELIGIONS AND THEIR FOUNDERS 

§ I. Religions, Spontaneous and Founded 

I. r I ^HE question as to the part played by Jesus Christ in 
A the creation of the Christian religion is particular 
or specific ; but it involves principles and problems which 
belong to the philosophy of religion and to its comparative 
history. Founded religions constitute a class or order by 
themselves ; their qualities can be explained only through 
the relations between them and their founders, and the con- 
ditions out of which they both grew. The founded may also 
be described as instituted or personal religions, in distinction 
from those which, as without any single or conscious creator, 
may be classified as natural, spontaneous, or impersonal. 
The spontaneous are products of the common or collective 
reason, whose units work, though without defined purpose, 
yet instinctively and concurrently, combined in action be- 
cause conditioned throughout by time and place ; but the 
instituted run back into certain historical personalities, and 
are, if not their immediate and designed creations, yet the 
clear outcomes of personal reasons and conscious wills. The 
impersonal religions are not the work of any one man or any 
special body of men, disciples or apostles, but rather of our 
common nature ; and they have come to be by a process as 
natural and as much regulated by law as that which produced 
language, custom, society, and the State. But the founded 
or personal religions have their source or spring, if not 
their sufficient reason, in some particular man and are in- 

258 



APOTHEOSES OF NATURE AND SPIRIT 259 

separably connected with certain specific beliefs as to his per- 
son, office, or work. The one class as collective live in, for, and 
through the tribe or people, grow with them, and form an inte- 
gral part of the national order ; but the other class as personal 
are rooted in the active reason, appeal to it, live in it, and 
grow with it. Spontaneous religions may be termed apothe- 
oses of nature, or the interpretation of spirit and the expres- 
sion of its ideas in sensuous forms ; but instituted religions 
may be described as apotheoses of personality, or the inter- 
pretation of man and the expression of his ideas in the terms 
of mind or spirit. As a first consequence the spontaneous 
religions tend to be in character more consuetudinary than 
ethical, more legal than rational, affairs of the community 
rather than of individuals or societies within it ; but the 
instituted, as more nearly allied to spirit than to nature, tend 
as regards matter to emphasize the ideal, and as respects form 
to think more of mind and character than of observance and 
custom. As a second consequence the spontaneous religions 
are not capable of detachment from the nation or tribe ; while 
the instituted addressing themselves to the individual, working 
from within outward, or using the outward only to get within, 
constitute societies out of the likeminded, and organize them 
according to some dominant principle. The distinction, then, 
seems to be here coincident with that between national and 
universal or missionary religions ; but it really carries us a 
step farther, for it enables us to trace the most distinctive 
attributes of the missionary religions to their sources or roots. 
Man is more universal than nature ; the system which has 
most humanity in it speaks to man most intimately and is 
most capable of satisfying him ; while the higher the moral 
character of him who institutes the religion, or causes it to 
be instituted, the finer will be its ethical qualities and the 
more humane its spirit. 

2. But though the spontaneous and the founded religions 
form distinct classes, they yet stand in historical relations and 



260 THE PERSONAL CONTINUOUS 

appear in a determined order. Three things are indeed ne- 
cessary to the creation of a personal religion : (i.) an historical 
background or a fit ancestry ; (ii.) a creative religious genius ; 
and (iii.) a congenial society or environment upon and within 
which the genius may operate. 

i. The instituted religion needs a substructure on which 
to build. As a matter of fact no religion capable of being so 
described is primitive or, in the strict sense, a new or a pure 
creation. We have here, as elsewhere, first that which is 
natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual. If the imper- 
sonal did not already exist, the personal could not even begin 
to be ; the one is the parent whose being the other as child 
presupposes and authenticates. To be the founder of a reli- 
gion is not to be its inventor — for the invented would be 
artificial, manufactured, arbitrary and therefore local and 
ephemeral ; but it is to be the cause or occasion which de- 
velopes a new species out of an old. Every founded religion 
implies therefore some ancient historical religion which it has 
transformed, on which it has built, and without which it would 
not have been possible ; but not every spontaneous religion is 
capable of becoming the foundation or parent of a personal 
religion. Growth does not always mean production, or de- 
velopment the creation of new forms ; for many religions 
have lived thousands of years and undergone infinite modifi- 
cations without changing their nature or losing their imper- 
sonal character. Thus Hinduism and the Vedic religion are 
so different that they may be said to have hardly a single 
essential feature in common ; their pantheons, priesthoods, 
worships, sacrifices, ceremonies ; their social systems, ideals of 
life, personal and collective, as well as their ideas of death 
and the future, all differ, often radically and even diametri- 
cally. Yet if anything in history be certain, it is that Hinduism, 
with all it stands for, has descended without any break of 
continuity, though with cumulative accretions and ever in- 
creasing variations from the faith held and the order observed 



WITH THE IMPERSONAL RELIGIONS 261 

by the Vedic men. On the other hand, Hebraism and Chris- 
tianity are much more alike than the two Indian systems and 
have an historical connexion even more intimate and organic. 
In their ideas of God, His character and His law, of man 
and his duty, of the prophet and his word, of life and its 
issues, in almost all those things in which the modern differs 
from the ancient Hindu, they fundamentally agree ; yet they 
constitute not one religion but two, each incapable of fusion 
with the other, dissimilar in character and independent in 
being. The Jewish had no room for the Christian religion, 
the Christian has no room for the Jewish ; and though they 
use the same name for God, speak of Him in identical terms, 
praise Him in the same Psalms, with equal reverence regard 
the same book as His inspired word, and alike enforce the 
need of clean hands and pure hearts in the men who would 
worship Him, yet one fact or belief so determines their respec- 
tive qualities and relations that neither can be merged in the 
other. Hebraism is Christianity and Christianity is Hebraism 
in every respect save this one, the interpreted Person of Jesus 
Christ ; what divides them is not the historical Jesus, the 
Man who was a son of Israel and lived in time, but the theo- 
logical Christ, the Person who has been construed into the 
Son of God, whose Deity is equal to the Father's. Without 
this we should have had no Christian religion, but only a 
Jewish sect the more ; with this we have a Jewish sect the 
less, but the largest and most missionary of religions. Yet 
though this belief more than any other thing divides and dis- 
tinguishes the religions, the younger owes its peculiar form 
and quality to the elder. For it is because the antecedent 
religion was so essentially a religion of the Divine unity that 
the passion for it was so native to its successor that it could 
never be tempted to think of Deity as other than one ; and it 
is because the successor not only had a new teacher but was 
a peculiar belief concerning Him that it became a new re- 
ligion essentially distinct from the old. The revolutionary 



262 THE DEITY AND THE INCARNATION 

and creative power did not lie so much in the person as in 
the belief ; and what gave the belief its power was that, so far 
from dissolving the monistic and exclusive quality of the 
theistic idea which it inherited and after which it was framed, 
it only helped the more to intensify and define it. And 
here we may see why the belief is so offensive to the Jew and 
so unintelligible to the Hindu. The Jew cannot conceive how 
his God could become incarnate in any man ; the Hindu 
cannot conceive how any one man should be the sole and 
exclusive incarnation of God. He thinks of deity as incarnate 
in every man and m all forms of life ; in so thinking he 
makes incarnation in the Christian sense impossible, for by 
deifying everything he undeifies all. The only possible form 
a revolt from Hinduism can assume is that of negation — a 
denial of the idea by which it lives, explains man, and or- 
ganizes society. Buddhism was this, and because it was this, 
while it lived in India long enough to show that in a system 
that knew no deity there could be no permanent or real 
apotheosis of the founder, yet its inevitable fate was to perish 
by being absorbed into the religion it had repudiated. But an 
absolute monotheism is a principle of absolute coherence and 
individuation ; it can allow no deity to stand alongside its 
God and share His worship and dignity. And if the idea of 
incarnation ever finds a foothold in connexion with such a 
Deity it must, unless His unity and personality are broken up, 
involve a unity and be expressed in a personality as absolute 
as His own. Hence the unity which constituted Hebraism 
was continued in Christianity, whose Founder became as 
solitary in deity and as pre-eminent in His solitude, as the 
Jehovah He realized rather than superseded. 

ii. The founder must be an historical person of creative 
genius. Unless he be " an historical person " there can be no 
continuity in the religion, nothing to bind it to the past, con- 
nect it with the present, or transmit it to the future. A 
system which is without antecedents can have no consequents, 



THE FOUNDER NO MERE REFORMER 263 

but is a mere isolated, and therefore inexplicable phenome- 
non. To be without father and mother is to be also without 
descendants, a being man can neither understand nor con- 
strue, neither believe nor imitate, neither obey nor follow. 
The historical reality of the founder is thus a condition ante- 
cedent to the historical being of the religion which is to bear 
his name. " Creative genius," again, is a term denotive of the 
force which enabled him to be what he was and perform what 
he did. It means more than intellectual, ethical, or social 
eminence ; it means such a transcendence of local conditions 
as cannot be explained by the completest inheritance of the 
past, a personality that so embodies a new ideal as to awaken 
in man the imitative passion and the interpretative imagina- 
tion. Thus the founder must here be distinguished from the 
reformer ; every founder may be a reformer of religion, but 
not every reformer is a founder. The reformer may arise, 
preach a new or revive an old doctrine, call to a higher life 
and institute a society for its realization ; and this type of 
man has been known to every historical religion, has appeared 
in some an innumerable multitude of times, though he has 
risen only to create a new sect or a new order within the old. 
To this class belong Benedict, Francis, and Dominic, and 
their great and saintly kinsmen in all the historical reli- 
gions. What changes the reformer into the founder is not so 
much his own act as his people's, the creative action of his 
personality on their imagination forcing them to invest him 
with attributes and functions supersessive of the authority 
and worship of the ancient gods. No teacher simply as a 
teacher ever created a new religion, for a religion is made not 
by discussions but by beliefs, not by abstract principles but 
by a concrete object of worship, not by the quickening and 
cultivation of the intellect but by the operation of an authority 
which commands the whole man, and organizes his life on a 
more spiritual basis and according to a higher ideal. It is, 
then, not simply in what the founder was and did, but in what 



264 THE HISTORICAL AND THE IDEAL 

he was conceived to be, that the forces creative of a new 
religion lie ; but even though his historical personality be 
thus transformed, it does not cease to be operative ; on the 
contrary, it becomes, by being idealized, more potent. For it 
is made the interpretative and normative term of the highest 
religious ideas ; the universe, its source and meaning, its 
course and end, are read in the light of his personality, and 
God is interpreted through the man. 

The founder, then, has a twofold value for the religion, an 
historical and an ideal. Without the historical he would have 
no connexion with humanity, standing outside it he would be 
unable to act upon it, absolved from all relations he would 
have no more worth than belongs to a dream or vision of the 
mind. Without the ideal he would have no transcendental 
significance, no meaning for the mystery of the universe, 
nothing to say to man touching the ideas by which he lives. 
The historical character of the founder determines the ethical 
quality of the faith he founds ; his transcendental signficance 
defines its higher beliefs. The two must be combined before 
knowledge of him can constitute a religion. 

iii. The function and the need of a congenial society or 
medium within which the founder may live and operate will 
now be apparent Its function is the interpretation of his 
person, the practice of his worship, the imitation of his charac- 
ter, the study of his thought, the realization of his ideals ; in 
a word, it is to make the religion called by his name a reality. 
The society may thus be denned as, on the one hand, a con- 
tributory.cause, and, on the other, a condition necessary, to 
the being of the religion. As the founder embodies for it 
the ultimate truth of the universe, so it embodies for mankind 
his mind and life ; and it is by these in their union that the 
religion is constituted. And there is a parallel between the 
creative process in the personal and in the natural religions. 
These latter arose from the intercourse of mind with nature ; 
but the former from the intercourse of mind with certain 



IN THE FOUNDER AXD HIS SOCIETY 265 

historical personalities. Nature in the one case, the per- 
sonality in the other, represent the objects to be interpreted ; 
in both cases mind brings the regulative ideas and inter- 
pretative categories to the object. Those ideas and 
categories which are, in the one case, latent in mind, are 
educed, explicated, and verified in the course of its en- 
deavour to interpret nature and comprehend itself ; but in 
the other case, these ideas and categories which have become 
explicit for thought through its being exercised on the 
ancestral religion and the problems it has raised receive 
expansion and, as it were, concretion by application to the 
historical person. This does not mean that the parallel pro- 
cesses justify the very dissimilar results, but it means that 
as the processes are rational the formulated results must be 
judged by analytic and comparative criticism. But the time 
for applying this canon is not yet. 

A founded religion may be defined, then, as a religion whose 
ultimate truth is an historical person speculatively construed. 
This definition, with the discussion which has led up to it, will 
help us to determine what religions fall within this category. 

§11. Impersonal Religions Classified as Persoiial 

We must exclude three religions, which are often reckoned 
as founded or personal, those of ancient Persia, of China, and 
of Israel, which are, respectively, ascribed to Zoroaster, to 
Confucius, and to Moses. Of these, Zoroaster is a person 
known only by the aid of dubious documents, late in origin, 
imperfectly understood, uncertain in date and in worth, and 
representing a religion whose history, broken and discontinu- 
ous, it is impossible critically to construe. Taken at the best 
Zoroaster is a teacher and reformer, not a founder, and his 
religion has an archaeological rather than an historical and 
living interest. But of the other two something more posi- 
tive may be said. 



266 CONFUCIUS A SAGE AND STATESMAN 

I. Nothing could be less correct than to describe the 
classical and imperial religion of China as the Confucian. 
Confucius did not create it, did not mean to do more than 
maintain it in its integrity, or, to use the term which best 
expresses his mind, " transmit it," just as it had been loved 
and observed by the fathers before him. He studiously 
avoided saying or doing anything which the ancients would 
have disapproved ; in their maxims and customs he found 
the wisdom which he, illumined by experience, applied to 
the regulation of life, public and private. He stayed 
within his own province, a counsellor of kings, a guide of 
States, an instructor of statesmen ; and discouraged as 
needless all inquiry touching what was before birth, after 
death, or above and behind the visible. As a son he illus- 
trated reverence ; as a citizen he exemplified obedience, 
though to sovereignty rather than to any person as sovereign ; 
as a magistrate he cultivated virtue, tempering justice with 
mercy and making the people's good his chief concern ; as a 
teacher he never forgot his disciples, but loved to open their 
eyes to the lessons and the duties suggested by common 
things. The heaven he thought of and believed in was a 
happy kingdom ; his saints and sages were the persons who 
could create and administer its laws ; his religion was the way 
by which it could be made to come. He loved and observed 
the ceremonies that turned the peasant into a well-mannered 
gentleman, and made the king a man while a ruler. He 
collected and edited the songs of his people, for he believed 
that they were the best allies of law and formed in men the 
law-abiding mind. He recorded the words and the acts of the 
wisest chiefs, and described the contentment which came from 
a virtuous reign. He made literature a mirror into which 
kings and peoples alike could look, see themselves and their 
times, and learn to admire the good and despise the evil. 
But he intended only to conserve what was old, though it was 
an idealized age, the creature of the imagination rather than 



NOT THE FOUNDER OF A RELIGION 267 

the reflexion of experience ; and the last thing he dreamed of 
doing was to establish a new religion. And his people, who 
have loved him well, have understood him perfectly. He is 
to them the ideal embodiment of a religion at once domestic 
and civil, without a priesthood but with duties defined by the 
home and the State. They have built temples in his honour, 
but to him as sage, not as God. Their worship, properly so 
called, is reserved either for the heaven which is above all and 
enfolds all, or for the ancestors who have made the family 
and love the families they have made. In the former case 
the worship is conducted by the emperor as head of the State ; 
in the latter, by the father as head of the household ; for the 
most common of all beliefs in China is this, that the spirits of 
the dead can never be happy without the sacrifices and 
progress of their living descendants. 

But this simple religion existed ages before Confucius ; his 
words and acts may have interpreted it, his wisdom have 
sanctioned it, his example enriched it and stamped it with 
the approval of the greatest immortal of his race, but he 
loved it too well to wish to see it changed, especially by or 
because of himself. His character is best described in his 
own words of true yet proud humility ; he was " simply a 
man who in his eager pursuit of knowledge forgot his food ; 
who in the joy of its attainment forgot his sorrows, and who 
therefore did not perceive that old age was coming on." He 
who could so speak of himself might be a sage, but he was 
not the founder of a religion. 

2. What the religion of Israel owes to Moses is a point 
criticism finds it hard, if not impossible, to determine ; and to 
attempt to determine it here would carry us into a field of 
discussion alien to the problem and purpose of this book. 
But, happily, we are not specially concerned with the literary 
questions as to the rise of monotheism, or as to the mode and 
time of its origin, but with the discovery of a cause sufficient 
to explain it and constant enough in operation to show how 



268 MONOTHEISM NOT THE CREATION 

it overcame a multitude of hostile forces subtly and cease- 
lessly active. Now the more we conceive its rise to have 
been gradual the less can we attribute it to any single man. 
And there are two significant things here : (a) the religion, 
when we get to know it, and so far as we do know it, is 
national rather than personal ; and (b) the idea that governed 
its history was the God who gave the law and not the man 
who received it. 

The first of these positions signifies that the constant cause 
which produced monotheism and never ceased to operate 
till it had been perfected, was more racial than individual. 
What used to be termed " the monotheistic instinct," L the 
peculiar endowment of the Semitic race, became in Israel 
the passion to conceive God as one, and Jehovah as the 
only God. The belief in its earliest form may have been 
crude, and the theistic idea may have been so loosely con- 
ceived as to be predicable of a multitude of beings of varying 
ranks and differing powers ; but all the more is there needed 
for the emergence of an absolute and exclusive unity, the 
operation of a permanent cause like a race. Polytheism was 
in the air ; it represented common and spontaneous beliefs ; 
it had flourished under the older and higher civilizations ; 
it was the faith of all the dwellers in Canaan, of all the cog- 
nate families and tribes : why, then, did Israel alone escape it ? 
Much has been made of the fact that he is often polytheistic 
in idea and feeling and act, in custom, in speech and 
inclination ; but we forget what the English civilian in 
India could illustrate out of his own experience, how 
impossible it was for Israel, situated as he was, wrestling 
with the poverty of speech and against strong tendencies 
in human nature, to be anything else. The fact we have 
to reckon with is the persistent growth, in the face of the 
mightiest adverse forces, of this monotheistic idea. And the 
persistence is the more extraordinary that the idea stood 

1 Ante, p. 217. 



OF MOSES BUT OF ISRAEL 269 

alone in a sort of naked simplicity, unsupported by the 
fellowship or countenance of kindred ideas. It was not 
made by any system of thought, but had to make its own 
system. And here the significance of the second position 
will appear ; the history of Israel did not so much produce 
the monotheistic idea as the idea produced the history. 
It made him ; it is his sole claim to remembrance : but what 
a claim it is ! How it places this rude, fierce, and intolerant 
people in the forefront of the benefactors of mankind ! And 
throughout it appears as the work of the family, rather than 
of any single man. Moses may have been the legislator 
of the family, yet he was not its sole or sovereign authority 
in religion ; others stand by his side, come after him, rise 
above him, even supersede him. His name subsumes the 
law and he becomes the synonym of rules that bind but do 
not govern. The note of the founder is that he is indis- 
pensable, he without whom the religion could not have been. 
i\nd monotheism could have been without Moses but not 
without Israel. Yet the legislator, alike in what he did not 
do and in what he did, perfectly impersonates the idea. If 
we conceive him to have lived in Egypt and to have been 
acquainted with its worship, it is marvellous how little of 
its religion he brought away with him — nothing of its ideas 
of the future, of the fate and treatment and judgment of 
the dead, of its sacred animals and signs, of its symbolism, 
its temples, its priesthoods, its nomenclature and its mystic 
lore. Yet if it suggested to him the idea that the law of 
God was a moral law which the state that took Him for its 
Sovereign was bound to obey, then it was the mother of 
the most potent and fruitful of all the beliefs that have 
worked for the amelioration of religion. For by this idea 
both God and religion have been moralized, and monotheism 
saved from falling into a monism, which must always con- 
ceive deity under physical or metaphysical, rather than under 
ethical categories. I then, Israel was the organ and vehicle 



270 BUDDHA THE CREATOR AND IDEAL 

of the religion, Moses may be described as not only its law- 
giver, but, as the later literature conceived him, as its prophet, 
as indeed the greatest because the first of the prophets, the 
type of the ideal servant of God whose voice men were to 
hear and obey. And a higher achievement than this no 
reformer or legislator could perform. 

§ III. Religions, Founded and Personal 

There remain to be considered as in the strict or proper 
sense founded religions, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity 
the three which have already been described as missionary. 1 
How did they come to be religions, as distinguished from 
sects or schools? What part did their respective founders, 
Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, play in their creation ? What 
reciprocal significance in each of these cases has the founder 
for the religion and the religion for the founder ? 

A. Buddha and his Religion 

i. The significance of Buddha as a philosophical teacher 2 
and a religious personality 3 has already been sketched. What 
we have now to do is to show the process by which he 
became what is termed the founder of a religion. We begin 
by noting his undisputed supremacy in his own church ; it 
lives by faith in him and in what he stands for. There is 
no image so familiar to the East as his ; he sits everywhere, 
in monastery, pagoda, and sacred place, cross-legged, medi- 
tative, impassive, resigned, the ideal of quenched desire, 
without any line of care or thought to disturb the ineffable 
calm or mar the sweetness of his unsmiling yet gracious face ; 
a silent deity who bids the innumerable millions who worship 
him become as blessed by being as placid as he is. And 
the belief which the image symbolizes is not of yesterday ; 

1 Ante, p. 230. 2 Ante, pp. 1 18-21. 3 pp. 240-44. 



OF A RELIGION MISSIONARY YET INDIAN 271 

it is as old as Buddha's church. The ancient formula of 
discipleship confesses the sufficiency of the Teacher, his doc- 
trine, and his order for all the needs of man. The council 
which met on the eve of his death knew the formula, 
spoke of him as the exalted, the enlightened one, whose 
word saved and with whom was the secret of a holy life. 
The second council, held about a hundred years later, 
proves the existence of sacred texts, definite doctrines, and 
an operative order. And these carry us near enough to the 
founder to make us sure that, however much his history 
may have been embellished by the retrospective imagination, 
he was no subjective ideal or mere lay figure arrayed in 
the worn out garments of the old solar mythology, but a 
real being of flesh and blood, though in genius ancient and 
Indian rather than modern and European. The world he 
moves in is too actual to allow us to dissolve him into 
unreality. It is very different from the Vedic world, but 
no less concrete and coherent, with men and women tem- 
pered by climate and changed by experience, but as true to 
type and time. Instead of the song we have the epilogue ; 
instead of the hymn, with its clear speech and praise of 
a God who has never been doubted, we have minds that 
have speculated till faith has failed and they have been 
compelled to ask, Who will show us any good and tell 
us whether there be any God, what we may call and how 
we may find Him ? Yet this India of the fifth century B.C. 
is as real as the Vedic India of five or even ten centuries 
earlier. It is a land where kings are powerful, chiefs are 
rich, priests influential, and peasants diligent ; where castes 
are strong and jealous of privilege, and the out-casted the 
most pitiable of men. Religion is the great concern, and 
men love it too well to allow it to become an affair of the 
priesthood, and conceive it to be a mother of truth and 
thought rather than custom and ritual. And so they feel 
the priest's forms to be tedious and divisive, while his 



272 THE INDIA OF BUDDHA 

sacrifices seem too cruel to be acceptable to the gentleness 
that ought to be the soul of all things. The seekers after 
a more excellent way fill the land, ascetics who have 
renounced all worldly pleasures that they may attain a 
beatitude without lust or desire ; mendicants who have 
ceased to toil and spin that they may begin the quest of 
the supreme good ; pious men who torture themselves that 
they may win the applause of a deity who loves self-in- 
flicted pain ; disciples who seek a master ; itinerant sages 
who offer to teach wisdom in the places where the con- 
sciously ignorant congregate. 

In the eastern region of this land, a region imperfectly 
Brahmanized, which may be described, in comparison with 
the sacred and ancient Vedic country lying to the westward 
as " Galilee of the Gentiles," the man who is to be the 
Buddha is born. The priest has not as yet here completed 
his usurpation, nor have the king and noble lost their ancient 
functions in religion ; while the spirit which compels man 
to conceive himself as made for eternity rules the selecter 
minds. By his birth the man has in him the blood of 
kings and warriors, but by instinct and temper the love 
of eternal things. He inherited the faith of his people, 
believed that he was fated to move through the immense 
and awful cycle of successive births and deaths, and he 
desired early and complete emancipation. The priestly 
method of attaining it seemed to him too slow, circuitous, 
and uncertain ; and was he not of the race of men Nature 
had made priests before art or custom created Brahmans ? 
And so he enquired of many teachers, but they did not 
help ; he tried many methods — asceticism, self-torture, renun- 
ciation — but in vain. At last meditation showed him how 
through suppression of desire to escape from sorrow and 
enter into the Nirvana which is perfect peace. When he 
had attained this knowledge he became Buddha, the 
enlightened ; and after he had overcome the temptation 



HIS PHILOSOPHY AND DISCIPLINE 273 

to keep . his secret he began to preach it, leading men 
through discipleship and_ his order into the way whose end 
was everlasting peace. 

2. Buddha thus became a teacher of a kind as common in 
India then as now. There the man with a message never 
wants a hearing, nor, if his message has promise or helpful- 
ness, does he ever want a following. The history of post- 
Vedic religion is but the biography of teachers, now ascetic, 
now scholastic, now social, now mystic, now rational, who 
have formed schools and founded sects, without ceasing to be 
Hindus ; on the contrary, only the more expanding and 
realizing Hinduism. And Buddha so acted in the way of 
his people as to exhibit evolution rather than revolution. 
And he himself could not do otherwise ; the logic that 
changed development into revolt came from his society. Yet 
the premisses on which it argued and acted were his. His 
philosophy was not orthodox ; it did not build on the Vedas, 
it denied the reality of Brahma and the persistence of the 
soul. It agreed indeed with the older schools in affirming 
that salvation was by knowledge rather than by priestly 
sacrifice and ritual ; but, unlike them, it did not seek the 
knowledge in a priestly service, or call its object by a priestly 
name. The Brahmans were to him like a chain of blind 
men, none of whom saw anything, and whose faith and dis- 
course were alike vain. Their sacrifices were at once foolish 
and ineffectual, cruel and profitless. The only sacrifice that 
became a king was the repair of all injustice ; that became a 
man was the cessation from lying and deceit, from the lust 
that coveted and worked unchastity, from the passion that 
killed to increase fleshly pleasure. Self-torture was no sacrifice, 
had no merit, and gained no good. In an unknown tongue 
there was no sanctity. Truth did not become truer, nor did 
excellence grow better by being stated in Sanskrit ; the speech 
the people knew was the fittest medium for the teacher. And 
the more people knew the truth the greater the number that 

p.c.r. 18 



274 APOTHEOSIS THROUGH THE CHURCH 

would be saved. But truth involved duty ; by obedience the 
knowledge was proved to be real, and the measure of perfec- 
tion was the degree of their harmony. Hence Buddha's 
society was twofold : an inner circle — a church or order, and 
an outer circle — the adherents. The former were made up 
of the called or chosen, men and women who renounced 
everything and became mendicants, monks and nuns, persons 
who had the vocation to a holy life. Celibacy and chastity 
were fundamental principles in a system which seeks to end 
the existence which is misery. The adherents were the de- 
vout, those who believed in the Buddha, but were not strong 
enough to make the great renunciation, and break the fetters 
that bound them to the sensuous world. The cardinal idea 
of the system is an individualism which is best when rea- 
lized in the social medium that promises to make an end of 
the individual. This individualism governs it throughout. 
Its one authority is an individual beside whom no second 
stands. Every individual is a self-sufficing unit, charged 
with the care and the control of his own destiny, who has the 
right of his own free will to make the last surrender, but on 
whom no other has any right to lay a violent hand. The 
happiest being is he on whom the love of the only life he has 
power over — his own — has died ; the next in happiness is he 
who so loves all being that he will inflict suffering on none. 
The first has become a saint and attained Nirvana ; the 
second has entered upon the path, and will in due season 
reach the goal. 

3. But do the narrative of Buddha's life, and the interpreta- 
tion of his mind, taken by themselves, explain the rise of the 
religion called Buddhism ? There is a teacher, a school he 
founds, scholars that revere him, multitudes that admire him, 
and a message he delivers concerning the knowledge that 
saves, but these things, even more in India than in Europe, 
do not found a religion, they only constitute a sect. Now 
what turned the school or sect into a religion ? It was the 



INCARNATION NO DISTINCTION 275 

event or process which we may term, all the more fitly that 
the system knows no god, the apotheosis of Buddha. The 
process was twofold, though the result was one, an imagina- 
tive and a speculative, or a mythological and a philosophical. 
The starting point was the master or teacher, the man, the 
Buddha, the Illuminated, who revealed to the ignorant the 
way of life. His manhood was not denied ; on the contrary, 
its reality was the primary assumption which made the crea- 
tive process possible. Deities are too common and too 
easily discovered in India to have much significance ; they 
appear everywhere in everything, and can be made to become 
anything. Incarnations are as common as deities, and as 
insignificant ; and to them it is more natural to assume an 
animal or a monstrous, than a human form. Hence to have 
conceived Buddha as a deity or as the incarnation of a deity 
would have been to deprive him of all distinction, to have 
made the fall of his school into a sect inevitable, and the 
rise of a religion bearing his name impossible. Individuality, 
then, is his attribute ; he is himself, and not simply the form 
of another. He has incommunicable properties, has a will of 
his own which performs duty and shapes character, and is 
not the mere mask of an unknown and irresponsible power. 
Hence comes the belief that he is an ethical being, that his 
chief qualities are moral, that his virtues, his grace and 
wisdom, his goodwill and kindness are his, and are real, and 
that out of his intrinsic qualities all his beneficent acts have 
issued. This was a new notion in India ; it was substituting 
an ethical for a metaphysical conception, and reaching the 
universe through the idea of a moral man rather than through 
the abstract idea of soul or substance. And here the my- 
thological process began ; the Buddha it transformed was 
a living being, for the moment the imagination touches 
death and the abstract they are quickened and personified. 
He was, therefore, not allowed to begin to be with birth, or 
to cease to be at death ; he became the personified benefi- 



276 HIS HUMANITY HUMANIZES ETHICS 

cence of the universe, doing good in all worlds and in all 
ages to all kinds and classes of suffering creatures ; and the 
people that meditated before his image, or spoke of him to 
the multitudes, clothed their faith in the forms that their 
imagination supplied. What the process achieved we may 
learn not simply from the " Birth Stories," but from the sober 
and often prosaic narratives of the Chinese pilgrims. Hiuen 
Tsiang, a doctor learned in the law, skilled in all the 
subtilties of what we foolishly call Nihilistic Buddhism, 
gravely tells how at this stupa, or that sacred place, the 
Blessed One had descended and confounded a sinner, or 
helped a saint, or built of precious stones some tabernacle for 
men to pray in. And as the imagination clothed him in a 
suitable mythology, so the speculative reason resolved him 
into " the eldest, the noblest of beings," and surrounded him 
with an army of " exalted, holy, universal Buddhas," though 
he alone remained the author of eternal salvation. And as on 
the one side he personified the moral energies of the universe, 
so on the other he became the governing ideal and example 
of human duty, the humanity of the standard making the 
ethics humane. And it was this transcendental interpreta- 
tion of its founder, his apotheosis as we have termed it, 
which made Buddhism a religion. The process may or may 
not have been legitimate, but it was here the only possible 
method of creation. Unless Buddha had been man, we 
should never have had his system or his influence ; unless he 
had been conceived as more than man, we should never have 
had his religion. The elevation and beauty of his humanity, 
when applied to the supreme object of worship, marked an 
immense advance on all prior notions of deity in the Orient ; 
but its want of a theistic basis left it nebulous and void, 
save for the pious imagination, which can be legitimately and 
finally satisfied only by the satisfaction of the reason. 



THE ARAB AND THE HINDU 277 

B. Mohammed and Islam 

I. Mohammed divides with Buddha and the Brahman 
the religious sovereignty of the Oriental mind, yet the 
sovereignties are in idea, in type, and in form worlds apart. 
All three are rooted in religion, but the faith of the Brahman 
is a polytheism so multitudinous and tolerant as to include 
everything that men may call deity, if only the deity will 
consent to be included and to be respectful to those who 
dwelt in the pantheon before him. The sovereignty of 
Buddha is that of the ideal man and the idealized pity, 
which, without concern or care for any god, draws humanity 
toward the dreamless beatitude he has himself attained ; while 
Mohammed's is strictly derivative and representative, due to 
his being the one sufficient and authoritative spokesman of the 
one Merciful and Almighty God. The Brahman's sovereignty 
is social and heritable, came to him by the blood which 
defined his place and function in society as well as his office 
before the gods and on behalf of men ; but both Buddha's 
and Mohammed's may be described as in a sense personal, 
though it was acquired by the one through his own efforts, 
achievements, and merits, and granted to the other by the 
will and deed of his God. The sovereignty of the Brahman 
is expressed in the society he has organized, the system, 
at once natural and artificial, of caste ; while Buddha's is 
expressed in a society whose orders correspond to his theory 
of merit, and Mohammed's in a brotherhood where all are 
equal before a God too great to know any respect of persons. 
The image, or the symbol, of his god which the Brahman 
loves is to Mohammed but a shameful and empty idol, while 
the statue which the Buddhist reveres speaks to him of a still 
more graceless idolatry, the supersession of the uncreated 
God by the created man he had appointed to be his minister. 
But though his sovereignty is not represented to the eye by 
any image, it yet has a fitter and more imperious symbol, 



278 MOHAMMED THE MAN 

a book which reveals the mind of God and proclaims the 
law which man is bound under the most awful and inexor- 
able sanctions to obey. The worship it enjoins is one of 
stern yet majestic simplicity ; it concerns God only, and 
there is but the one God who has made Mohammed his 
final and sovereign prophet, and declared through him that 
all idols are " idleness and vanity." 

They have not any power ; no, not over the husk of a date. 
If ye call upon them, they hear not your calling. 1 

But though no image of God or man is to be tolerated, 
yet the tomb of the saint is to be visited by the foot of 
the pilgrim, and over it may rise the mosque where God 
will be all the more devoutly praised that the dust of a 
servant waits beneath till the resurrection of the just. 

Now Mohammed is of all religious founders the most 
intimately known, and Islam is the only religion of which 
it can be said it was born in the open day. There is no 
book more autobiographical than the Koran, more capable 
or more in need of being interpreted through history. This 
makes it peculiarly difficult to a stolid and unimaginative 
Western mind to be just either to the man or the religion. 
Instead of standing in the workshop amid its perplexing 
cross-lights, lurid fires, blazing furnaces, ringing hammers, 
torrid heat, and perspiring craftsmen, we sit in .our cool 
study, analyze, criticize, award, praise, and blame as if the 
religion had been forged in an atmosphere as undisturbed 
and luminous as our own, and by men as detached and 
cultivated as we assume ourselves to be. And so Voltaire, 
who knew Paris excellently, but knew nothing of Arabia, 
little of religion and less of man, conceived Mohammed as 
a lustful hypocrite, who pleaded inspiration in order that he 
might gain a freer and fuller licence for his vice ; while 

1 Koran : Sura xxxv. 



HIS CHARACTER AND EDUCATION 279 

Gibbon, who disliked fanaticism, whether embodied in a 
Julian, a Mohammed, or a Calvin, described Islam as com- 
pounded of an eternal truth and a necessary falsehood, the 
truth being the unity of God, the falsehood that Mohammed 
was His prophet. And as if to keep us humble and the 
balance true, we have one modern and Christian scholar 
tracing his inspiration to Satan, and another resolving his 
religion into hysteria. But in history it is a useful canon 
never to assume that great effects can have mean causes. 
In matters of faith and the Spirit nothing fails like dupli- 
city and make-believe ; nothing is so necessary to success as 
integrity and conviction of mind. The splendid sincerity 
of Mohammed's early disciples sufficiently testifies to the 
reality of his own ; but he was sincere in the manner of 
an Arab and an unlettered visionary. We must imagine 
this Arab as a delicate, posthumous child nursed by the 
Bedouin, early left without a mother, first to the care of a 
grandfather, then of uncles kindly disposed but critical. 
He grew into a boy who loved to commune with nature 
and gather the wild berries as he tended his flocks ; he 
became a youth with few companions, with a soul that 
sickened at the coarser vices, meditative, sensitive to suffer- 
ing, susceptible to the finer emotions, shrinking from pain, 
and destitute of the physical courage which easily turned 
into ferocity, and which the Arab admired as the bravery 
proper to a man. In his solitude great thoughts came to 
him ; travel and intercourse with men brought glimpses 
into a larger world than Arabia knew of. Marriage, bring- 
ing wealth, supplied him with the opportunities for silence, 
solitude, and visions, which reflected his richer experience. 
He had heard of the Jewish patriarchs, and the story of 
Abraham, the friend of God and the father of Ishmael ; 
it touched his imagination, and he saw the Arab tribes 
unified, their sacred places purged, themselves made the 
heirs of the promise, and their deities, Lat and Ozza and 



280 THE VISION OF ABRAHAM 

Manat, cast out by the one supreme God. He heard of 
Moses, and he learned to think of God, the lawgiver, 
calling His people into the wilderness, forming them into 
a state where idolatry was forbidden, and the prophet was 
the voice of God. He thought of these things in the way 
of an imaginative man till they took hold of him, possessed, 
inspired him, forced him into speech. 

Cry ! in the name of thy Lord who created— 
Created man from clots of blood. 1 

In a passage of amazing beauty and majesty, which may 
well be read as a chapter from his own experience, he 
pictures Abraham 2 called from his idols to the faith in the 
one God. The evening falls and the stars come out one 
by one in the lustrous evening heaven, and he cries, 
"This, indeed, is the Most High"; but the moon rises, 
and they fade, and he thinks, " Here is the Being I 
must worship." Then the dawn breaks, the moon pales, 
and the sun rises out of the bosom of night, and he 
bends before this all-glorious luminary as the light which 
is God ; but the day ends, night and darkness return, 
and Abraham thinks the Eternal can never pass and be 
eclipsed, and he says, " I turn my face to Him who hath 
created the heavens and the earth." 

2. The monotheism of the Semite, simple, inflexible, sove- 
reign, had at last found a fit organ, and from the call of 
God there could be no turning back. But though Moham- 
med must speak, he could not always convert ; a few, his 
wife, a slave, a friend believed ; some hesitated, many 
doubted, the vast majority denied and hated as only the 
untutored mind can hate when it sees its ancient gods 

1 Sura xcvi. 

2 Sura vi. Cf. the Jewish prototype in Geiger, Was hat Moh. aus 
dem Judenthum auf^enommenf pp. 123-125. It will help us the more 
to feel the beauty that may be conferred by the touch of genius. 



ISLAM AND THE SWORD 281 

scorned and dismissed for a God it does not see. Hence 
came years of conflict, force pitted against faith, strength 
against weakness. Exasperation, pain, and death confronted 
the prophet and his religion. Then Medina opened her 
arms, and called, and, helped by what has ever seemed to 
the imagination of his people a series of miracles, he stole 
out of Mecca, and by his flight saved himself and founded 
Islam. And what he founded was not only a religion, but 
a State, the two being one. The ideas were there, the 
omnipotent God, the mortal man ; heaven for the faithful, 
hell for the unbeliever. But the institution was there also, 
the prophet, who was the voice of God, his word which 
was God's truth, the law which could not be broken but 
must be obeyed. And this law created a State, which lived, 
as States must, by the sword, but a sword wielded, as none 
had hitherto been, by the hand of the Almighty. It is not 
indeed, true to say " Islam is founded on the sword " ; it 
is founded on the prophet's word, and it preaches and 
teaches with a zeal and a fanaticism no religion has ever 
surpassed. Yet the sword was used by the prophet and 
has been used by his successors in a way unknown to the 
other founded religions. Asoka, the Buddhist, may have 
subdued India, and Constantine may have conquered the 
Roman Empire in the name of the Cross ; but these were 
acts of violent disobedience and usurpation, for Buddha 
did not love the battle, and Jesus expressly deplored war 
and condemned the sword. It is impossible, then, to 
acquit Mohammed of the charge of spreading his religion 
by the sword, although he did not found upon it. For two 
things of incontrovertible historical truth may here be said : 
(a) Without the sword he never would have converted the 
Arab tribes and made them the apostles and warriors of 
his religion ; and (b) his use of the sword has sanctioned 
its use by all his successors. Wars of religion may be even 
more desolating than those of military or political ambition ; 



282 SEVERITY AND MERCY OF THE PROPHET 

but wars by religion encourage, above all others, ferocity 
and blood-madness. And the history of Islam, unhappily, 
abounds in proofs of this fact. But even in his wars 
Mohammed did not forget his religion, though his mind- 
fulness but showed the old Arab alive within him. The 
spoils taken from the enemy enriched the brotherhood, 
being divided according to principles of merit and equity. 
If the nearest kinsman was an unbeliever, he was shown no 
more pity than the most complete alien ; if the bitterest foe 
became a convert, he was at once taken to the bosom of 
the prophet and the faith. Of an unbelieving uncle, he 
said : 

Blasted be the hands of Abu Lahab ! and let himself be blasted ! 
His riches shall not profit him, nor what he has earned ; 
He shall be cast into the broiling flame. 1 

When he had fought and conquered Mecca, and had 
thrown down her idols, for 

Truth had come and falsehood gone j 
For falsehood vanisheth away, 2 

his magnanimity reached even to his most implacable foe, 
who now submitted, and was bidden " Hasten to the city, 
and say that none who taketh refuge in the house of Abu 
Sofian (the man himself) shall be harmed this day." But 
another and no less significant change happened at Medina. 
Before, Jerusalem had been his holy city, thither Gabriel had 
borne him on a winged .steed, and he had met and been 
welcomed by a council of ancient prophets. Thence he had 
been carried into heaven, and the lips of God had com- 
manded him and his people to pray five times daily with faces 
towards the holy Temple. But now Mecca was idealized ; 
ancient memories made her beautiful in the prophet's sight. 
" Thou art the choicest spot upon earth to me, and the 

1 Sura cxi. 2 Sura xvii. 82. 



HIS RELIGION A STATE 283 

most delectable," he cried ; and the city of his love became 
the sacred city of his faith. The Divine voice said : " Turn 
thy face towards the holy temple of Mecca " ; 1 and so 
it henceforth was the true kibla, the goal of pilgrimage, 
with its once heathenish black stone and holy well sanctified 
for" evermore. But these ways signified a radical change in 
the mind of Mohammed. The prophecies he now delivered 
were occasional, and served the occasion ; some were in- 
tended to hush scandal, others to reconcile estranged friends 
or despoil enemies, to proclaim wars or celebrate victories, 
to enhearten after defeat, to regulate worship, or even to 
justify the prophet in taking a new wife to his home. While 
he lived the law was alive, grew daily, and daily was modified 
and applied. When he died it was closed, became a corpus 
which had to be interpreted, but could itself suffer neither 
increase nor diminution. His death saw the Koran finished, 
the State constituted, and Islam founded. 

3. Islam as just described may be conceived to be a State 
rather than a religion, but it would be wrongly so conceived. 
For it is both a religion and a State — a religion by virtue 
of its ideas and ends, a State by virtue of its forms and 
means. As a religion it is Semitic rather than Arabian ; as 
a State it is Arabian rather than Semitic. As a religion it 
is secondary and derivative, with sources partly Jewish 
and partly Christian ; as a State it is original though not 
independent, a dream of universal dominion conditioned by 
the local customs, tribal polities, and social order of Arabia. 
The force which fused these elements together and made 
them into the civil religion or religious State we call Islam, 
was Mohammed. He did not discover the ideas, for they 
existed before him, but he translated them into the tongue 
of Arabia, he made his beliefs live in forms so vivid, so pic- 
turesque, so full of poetic charm and spiritual passion and the 
conviction which may not be questioned, that the imagina- 

1 Sura ii. 146. 



284 THE ULTIMATE IDEAS OF ISLAM 

tions and consciences of all who believed his word became 
as potter's clay in his hands. The Koran is indeed a mar- 
vellous book, which speaks with tremendous force to men 
who can and do believe it. Its God is a consuming fire in 
a sense quite unknown to the Old Testament. There the 
future has but a feeble or shadowy existence ; the scene 
where Jehovah reigns is more this world than the next. 
But in the Koran if God is eternal, man is immortal, and 
death is no escape from His hands. In no religion is the 
other world so real as in Islam ; heaven is described in terms 
most alluring to the oriental imagination, hell in words that 
scorch and blacken. And God holds man and his destiny 
in His inexorable hands, awards heaven to the believer, hell 
to the infidel, no one being able to escape His terrible decree. 
The idea is one of transcendent power, so simple, so intelli- 
gible, so commanding, especially to those who feel that there 
is nothing between them and this sovereign will. Polytheism 
leaves man the master of the gods, they are his creation, 
and if he despairs of one, he can find help and hope in 
another ; but a rigorous monotheism offers no alternatives, 
allows no concealment, sets man as it were naked before an 
eternal Face whose smile is life and whose frown is death. 
And the duties based on the idea were as simple as the idea 
itself. They were prayer and fasting, which had reference to 
God ; almsgiving, which was duty to the brotherhood ; and 
the pilgrimage to Mecca, which was a sort of homage to the 
birthplace of the religion, an outward and visible sign of 
unity, and a witness to the power of Arabia over the founder. 
But above all, authenticating all, stood the prophet. The 
God to be believed was the God he revealed ; to deny Mo- 
hammed was to disbelieve God. His authority was ultimate, 
for through him God had freely and finally spoken and only 
through him could God be really known. The primary 
belief, then, in Islam is not the unity of God, but the 
apostolate of Mohammed. The beliefs do not simply stand 



THE MAN INCARNATE IN THE WORD 2S5 

indissolubly together, but the greater is built upon the less. 
Without the prophet God would still be One, but the one 
God would not be believed and known of men. 

4. Here, then, we can see in what sense Mohammed can be 
conceived as the founder of the religion. Without him it 
could not have been ; he is not simply the medium of its 
realization but of its continuance. Islam is the one absolute 
book religion of the world, and may be most properly defined 
as the Apotheosis of the Word. The Koran is the mind of 
Mohammed immortalized for his people, speaking to them, 
being questioned by them, making their laws, governing their 
lives. His God is theirs, conceived in his terms, worshipped 
in his manner, obeyed in his spirit. And this means that an 
Arab's consciousness of the sixth century A.D. has determined 
the deity and governs the faith of Islam. The connexion 
between the man and the religion can thus be dissolved only 
by the death of both. It has often been said that Islam 
is of all the great religions the nearest a pure naturalism. 
Its earliest history has few miracles, perhaps none, and but 
for certain incidental customs the most strenuous believer in 
natural law might be a devout Moslem. The saying is as 
superficial and inaccurate as any saying of ignorance could 
well be. The supernatural and the miraculous are the very 
atmosphere which Islam breathes. Mohammed himself is 
to it a supreme miracle. He stands alone among men, God's 
apostle, without a rival and without an equal, and to question 
his authority is to doubt the truth and veracity of God. So 
cardinal is his pre-eminence to the theology of Islam that 
how to conceive the prophet and yet to keep him man, 
has been at once its most inevitable and insoluble problem. 
On his supremacy, as not simply personal but transmissible 
and hereditary, the greatest of all the Mohammedan schisms 
is based. And as with his person, so with his word ; it is 
his incarnation, himself made immortal, universal, articulate. 
And here also we come upon a fundamental problem of the 



286 MIRACLES IN ISLAM 

Schools : how did the Koran begin to be, and when ? Truth 
is eternal, and the Koran is the truth. Eternity is thus its 
note ; and though God showed it in vision to Mohammed, 
and he told his vision to men, yet it had ever been in God, 
the light of his bosom and the love of his heart. The most 
rigid Christian theories of the sacred canon and inspiration 
are but nebulous dreams compared to the dogmas which have 
defined and enshrined the Koran. And this brings us to 
the miraculous in its early history ; the whole story of its 
coming is a miracle — the visions of the prophet, the angels 
that speak to him and that carry him whither they will, the 
God in whose name and at whose bidding he speaks, are all 
miracles, as full of supernatural ideas and incidents as the 
most credulous mind could desire. The very collection of 
the Koran under Abu Bekr, the destruction under Othman, 
fifteen years later, of all versions but one, and the consequent 
formation of a single authoritative text, signified that the 
book was held to be so miraculous that it must be preserved 
as their book of life, and so preserved that there should be 
but one form of the prophet's words, these and no other 
being the truth of God. And here we touch the point where 
the ideas of the religion and the State coalesce. Both are 
positive creations, i.e. are founded and built up by positive 
laws. Positive laws are expressions of a personal or com- 
munal will, the rules it makes and the precepts it formulates 
for the guidance of the individual and the ordering of 
society. Islam then, whether conceived as religion or as 
State or as both, is a creation of positive law, the work of 
a personal will, of the man we know as Mohammed. 

§ IV. Canons of Criticism or Regulative Ideas 

The relation of Jesus to the founding and formation of 
the Christian religion is too immense a subject to be discussed 
as a subordinate head in a single chapter ; but we may here 



RELATION OF RELIGION AND FOUNDER 287 

formulate certain regulative ideas or critical principles that 
seem to have emerged from these discussions. 

i. The Founder and the religion stand so related that 
neither can be considered without the other. His historical 
being precedes and conditions its historical origin, and exer- 
cises a permanent effect on its development. In him its 
qualities lie implicit ; in it his immanent character and mind 
are evolved. This means that the religion not only begins 
with or starts from him, but perpetuates and propagates the 
ethical type he impersonates. Moral character is thus a 
matter of fundamental importance to the religion. 

ii. The Founder has an historical and an ideal significance 
both for his own religion and for philosophy or thought 
in general. The historical significance concerns not only the 
part he played in making the religion first possible and 
then actual, but also the influence he has exercised on its 
earliest behaviour and its later developments. The ideal 
significance concerns not only the part he has played and 
been the means of making his religion play in the history 
of man and of religion, but also the relation in which he 
stands to the ideal cause, process, and end of human life, 
individual and collective. 

iii. The historical person of the Founder determines the 
outward character of the religion, its institutions and civil 
form, the means it uses to fulfil and develop its function as 
a factor of social order and ethical amelioration as well as to 
cultivate the persons it enlists and commands and relates 
to the Eternal. The order of Buddha and the State of 
Mohammed are their personal creations. 

iv. The ideal significance of His person determines the 
permanent and essential value of the Founder to man and 
religion. For as the person is conceived to be supreme in 
history, in mind, and in the universe of actual being, he is 
the symbol of all that the universe is on its most real yet 
mysterious side : the side it turns to man as he seeks to 



288 REVELATION AND THE FOUNDER 

know why he is and for what end. The' theology of the 
person becomes then the religion's philosophy of nature and 
man, of mind and history. 

v. If the Founder is to be known, he must never cease 
to speak ; if he is to be a universal authority, his mind must 
never taste death, but be so immortalized as to be always 
and everywhere accessible to those who would inquire of 
him. This explains the need and defines the function of 
revelation as it exists in a personal religion ; it turns the 
moment of the Founder's historical being into an everlasting 
now. To be complete the revelation must enable us to 
know the Founder, his personal history, what manner of 
man he was, how he took himself and caused himself to 
be taken, what he taught and what men thought concerning 
him, what he intended, achieved and suffered. In other 
words, it must enable us to judge not only as to the 
Founder's person and history, but as to the entire process 
that created the religion. It is only thus that we can 
discover what it really is, and conceive it according to its 
place and worth and work in universal history. 






BOOK I I 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND THE MAKING OF THE 
CHRISTIAN RELIGION 

IN THREE PARTS 

I. The Founder as an Historical Person ; or Jesus as con- 
ceived AND REPRESENTED IN THE EVANGELICAL HISTORY 

II. The Interpretation of the Founder ; or the Creation 
of the Christian Religion through the Apostolical 
Construction of Jesus as the Christ 

III. The Comparison of the Elements and Ideas in this In- 
terpretation with those most constitutive in the 
Ideal of Religion as conserved and exemplified in 
the Historical Religions 



P.CR. 28 9 19 



HdvTa v/xwv e(TTiv, vpels Se XpioroO, Xpicrros 8e GeoO. 

— Paul, i Cor. iii. 23. 

Humanum genus bene se habet et optime, quando secundum quod 
potest Deo adsimilatur. Sed genus humanum maxime Deo adsimilatur 
quando maxime est unum ; vera enim ratio unius in solo illo est. — DANTE, 
De Monarchia, I. cap. viii. 

Igitur, qui innocentiam colit, Domino supplicat ; qui justitiam, Deo 
libat ; qui fraudibus abstinet, propitiat Deum ; qui hominem periculo 
surripit, optimam victimam caedit. Haec nostra sacrificia, haec Dei sacra 
sunt; sic apud nos religiosior est ille qui justior. — M. MiNUClUS FELIX, 
Octavius, cap. xxxii. 

Alle Erscheinungen des religiosen Lebens auf Erden, auch das 
Christenthum, sind nur in der Idee der Religion wissenschaftlich zu ver- 
stehen, zu vviirdigen, und der Idee gemass, nach ihrem Musterbegriffe 
und Musterbilde, reiner, hoher, und lebenreicher auszubilden. — K. C. F. 
KraUSE, Die absolute Religionsphilosophie, p. 1013. 

Eine nur ist sie fur alle, doch stehet sie jeder verschieden, 
Dass es Eines doch bleibt, macht das Verschiedene wahr. 

An die alttestamentliche Religion hat das Christenthum angeknupft 
und sich als seinen Schluss, als seine Erfiillung und Vollendung darge- 
stellt, dem Judenthum aber ist es entgegengetreten. Und das Christen- 
thum ist nur eine neue und letzte Stufe dieser selben Offenbarungs- 
religion : auf ihr ist der Heilige selbst erschienen, und das Ideal, welches 
die alttestamentliche Stufe im Volke Israel vergeblich darzustellen 
suchte, eine heilige Gemeinde, ein Reich Gottes auPErden wird nun 
verwirklicht durch die, welche mit ihm in die Gemeinschaft des 
Glaubens treten und die Kraft der Heiligung aus ihm ziehen. — A. DlLL- 
MANN, Ursprung der Alttestamentlichen Religion, 1865, p. 35. 

Alles hat seine Zeit, 

Der Heir der Zeit ist Cott, 

Der Zeiten Wendepunkt Christus, 

Der rechte Zeitgeist der heilige Geist. 



290 



INTRODUCTORY 

RECAPITULATION AND STATEMENT OF THE NEW 
QUESTION 

§ I. The Old Problem 

THE principles elucidated in the past discussions have 
now to be applied to a problem which is all the more 
philosophical that it is so historical and particular, viz., the 
interpretation of the relation between the Founder of the 
Christian religion and the religion He founded. What is 
involved in this new discussion may become more obvious 
if we resume the successive stages of the argument which 
has led up to it. 

i. The argument started with an examination into what is 
meant by the idea of Nature, and whether it can be used to 
deny the being and action of a supernatural Reason. What 
may be termed the primary premiss may be stated either 
thus : — the interpreter of nature is also its interpretation ; or 
thus : — the problem of individual is one with that of collective 
experience. The fact of knowledge was found to imply a 
transcendental factor which justified the inference as to the 
ultimate and causal reality of thought. From the correlation 
of the intellect and the intelligible, or of rational man and an 
interpretable universe, it was argued that they must have 
had as their common ground a creative Intelligence, who 
had used the visual language we call nature to speak to the 
incarnate reason we call man. 

ii. This primary premiss was next expanded into the 

position that man was not simply a being who knew, but a 

291 



292 GOD AS RESPONSIBLE FOR MAN 

person who acted, that his actions could be qualitatively- 
distinguished, that he felt the obligation and possessed the 
power to choose the good and avoid the evil ; and that as 
the intellect implied an intelligible, so man as a moral person 
involved a moral universe, while the two in their concord- 
ance and concurrence justified the belief in a moral order. 
According to the first argument God was to be interpreted 
in the terms of the reason; according to the second, in the 
terms of moral sovereignty or of conscience and will ; while 
both arguments conducted to the conclusion that the rela- 
tions between the Creator and the creature must be active, 
continuous and spiritual. 

iii. The third step in the argument was a discussion of the 
gravest of all the facts which a believer in moral order can 
face — the fact of evil. The rational and moral creature had 
behaved as an imperfect and inexperienced being, which he 
was, and not as a perfect and eternal being, which he was 
not ; and so his earliest attempts at using his freedom had 
been by the indulgence of self-will, whence had come evil 
and the suffering which disciplined. But while evil owed its 
being to man, it had only increased what was termed the 
responsibility of God ; in other words, it was impossible to 
conceive that infinite goodness would cease to seek to help 
and heal the creature whose being it had willed, because that 
creature had been so misguided as to choose the evil rather 
than the good ; and if divine action on behalf of man con- 
tinued, how better could it be described than as continuous 
creation ? 

iv. The argument then moved forward from nature and 
man in the abstract to nature and man in the concrete, living 
together, acting and interacting on each other, nature as 
physical environment, man as the moral and social organism 
we speak of now as society and now as state. This carried us 
into the field of history, and it was contended that the ideas 
of law and progress which had made nature interpretable and 






CONTINUES HIS CREATIVE ACTIVITY 293 

had organized its interpretation into the collective physical 
sciences, must be valid here also, or they could have no 
validity anywhere. But though we were bound to conceive 
order and unity, co-ordinated movement and change in the 
common life of man as in universal nature, yet they must be 
conceived as operative under appropriate forms, i.e. forms 
proper not to physical energies, but to thought, to reasons, 
emotions, consciences, wills, or simply to man and mankind. 
But what history exhibits is a creative process rather incom- 
plete than completed. Biology has to construct the succes- 
sion and filiation of organic forms by an act of retrospective 
imagination ; but history, though it has to deal with an 
immeasurable past, yet can study the forces that make for 
evolution, producing the moral, the social, and the religious 
forms of the present. We may then distinguish the two 
arenas thus : — in nature where new organisms have ceased 
to appear, evolution may be said to have accomplished its 
work ; but in history the work is still only in process, and 
waits final accomplishment. Here, then, is the field where 
the Creator's continued activity finds its fitting sphere ; and 
its products are (1) the ideas creative of human progress and 
unity, and (2) the persons through whom they come 

v. But the ideas that do most to evoke and to organize the 
humanity latent in man are those embodied in his religions, 
and so here if anywhere the continued activity of the Creator 
can be studied. It is indeed a mediated activity, conditioned 
by the medium in and through which He works. And so 
its forms had to be analyzed, viz., the notion of religion, its 
sources, the method in which it does its work, the causes and 
conditions which affect the many shapes it assumes. In all 
religions men think of deity, and as they think they worship ; 
and in all they believe themselves to influence him and to 
be influenced by him. And the voice of Nature is here the 
voice of truth. 

vi. From religion in the abstract the discussion moved into 



294 RELIGIONS AND THEIR FOUNDERS 

the field of the concrete, its history ; attempted to find what 
had made and kept religions national ; and what had impelled, 
out of all the multitude of local or tribal religions, only three 
to seek to transcend the nation and become missionary. 
The ideas of a religion were, it was argued, more capable of 
translation and diffusion than its institutions, which tended 
as local and tribal to hedge off the people and to hinder the 
distribution of their faith. Analysis further showed that the 
national religion which possessed the most universal idea — 
the Hebrew — was as much limited as any by the usages 
which the fanaticism of the people jealously guarded and 
observed, as if they constituted its very essence ; and was 
therefore, by being placed under rigorous tribal restrictions, 
prevented from realizing its idea. The emancipation of this 
idea, and its embodiment in a religion at once universal and 
missionary, was in a special and peculiar sense the achieve- 
ment of Jesus Christ. 

vii. But if the Christian religion is conceived as the achieve- 
ment of Jesus Christ, it owes its existence to a person, and 
thus falls into the category of instituted or founded religions. 
Indeed, the three which have been described as " missionary" 
had all a personal origin ; and each has had its special character 
or creative and constitutive idea determined by the person who 
gave it being. Hence the question as to the relation between 
the religion and its founder is not peculiar to Christianity, 
but is common to the class as a whole, and so belongs to the 
province of comparative history and philosophy. Approached 
from this point of view it was found that while an historical 
person and his creative acts were presupposed in the religion, 
yet it could not in any real sense begin to be without some 
form of apotheosis by the community. Institution or creation 
was thus a process due to the concurrence of two distinct 
factors, which may be described as, respectively, personal and 
communal. These gave to the founder a significance at once 
historical or real, and intelligible or ideal ; while without the 









QUESTIONS TOUCHING CHRISTIANITY 295 

first the religion could have had no positive existence, with- 
out the second it could have no intellectual value, no moral 
energy, no continuous being as a social force appealing to 
the conscience and the imagination of man. Hence come 
regulative ideas, terms and standards of comparison which 
we must not shrink from applying to the connexion between 
Jesus Christ and the Christian religion. 

§11. The New Problem 

If, then, we carry these categories with us, we may the 
better appreciate the questions we have now to discuss : How 
was it that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish peasant, became 
the Founder of the Christian religion ? Was it as a peasant 
and as a Jew ? Did He create the religion, or was He rather 
its creature ? If He created it, by virtue of what qualities 
did He accomplish the work ? If it created Him, by what 
process and impelled by what causes did it produce so 
remarkable an effect ? In other words, How do His person 
and the religion stand related to each other ? What does it 
owe to Him and He owe to it ? May we say that He did 
not so much found it as cause it to be founded ? And what 
does this causation imply concerning His person, its con- 
stituents, continuance, functions? If religion can as little 
be without worship as without belief, is Christian worship a 
mere exercise of the subjective spirit, or has it any correlative 
objective reality ? What is this reality ? Would the religion 
continue were Christ believed to be dead, or conceived as 
only a beautiful soul incarnated in His own rare words for 
the admiration and instruction of mankind ? Can it be 
claimed for His Person that as interpreted in the apostolic 
writings it made an absolute and ideal religion possible ? 
And can anything from the fields of philosophy and history 
be said as to the warrant or legitimacy of this claim ? 

These questions trench on the province of certain con- 
nected and cognate studies which it is impossible either to 



296 THE ANCILLARY STUDIES 

pursue here or entirely ignore. The most important of them 
is the literary and historical criticism of the oldest Christian 
literature. This criticism takes the literature as a corpus or 
body of scriptures which has to be studied and explained 
through its sources, historical and personal, through lan- 
guage and thought, through social and religious movements, 
antecedent and contemporary tendencies and events. Once 
it has showed us how the literature came to be, in what 
order it was written, at what date, by what men, in obedience 
to what impulse, for what end, its work is done, — its problem 
is solved. But our question is at once larger and more radi- 
cal. The literature is to us the scheme of a religion and the 
story of its founding ; and as such it is even more organically 
connected with the future than with the past. We have to 
study it not as a fact to be explained, but as a factor of 
events which without it would be without any explanation. 
What concerns us is indeed still history, but it is a history 
whose temporal and spatial relations have been so widened 
as to become universal and eternal. What we seek to gain is 
not simply the mind of a contemporary, or the knowledge of 
the exact conditions which produced each document and of 
the world it reflects ; but also to discover the seeds and 
causes of the ideal world in which we dwell. We do not 
cease to use criticism, for by determining the nature and 
value of our sources it governs the degree and the certainty 
of our knowledge ; but its canons do not measure for us the 
religion which the literature it handles at once describes and 
enshrines. For this we have to study it in the light of collec- 
tive religion, or as it lives in the medium of the human spirit 
and answers to it, and as it stands on the stage of history, 
living and behaving as its creative ideas command. 

§ III. The Criticism of the Literature and the Person 
The literature, as related to our subject, falls into two 
main divisions, — one, the Gospels, concerned with the personal 



THE LITERATURE AND THE ORIGINS 297 

history of Jesus ; the other, the apostolical writings, including 
the Acts, concerned with the interpretation of His Person as 
the Christ. The former show us what manner of man the 
Founder of the religion was ; the latter what the thought of 
His people conceived Him to be and what they accomplished 
in His name. But the chronological relations of these divi- 
sions are not the same as their historical. In the order of time 
the person precedes the interpretation ; but the books which 
interpret Him are older than those that narrate His personal 
history. The most certainly authentic documents in the New 
Testament, contemporary with the events they describe or 
refer to, are not the Gospels, but certain Pauline Epistles ; 
and of these the first must have been written about 50 A.D., and 
the last could hardly have been later than 62. Of the non- 
Pauline Epistles the greatest and the weightiest, Hebrews, 
belongs probably to about the year 70, while near it in point 
of date stands a work of, possibly, inferior theological 
importance, the Apocalypse. In these we have what may 
be termed a completed Christology, though the only Gospel 
that existed in the year 70, if, indeed, it did then exist, was 
that of Mark. He is one of the Synoptists, the other two, 
divided from Mark by periods, probably, of from ten to 
fifteen years, being Matthew and Luke, who use the same 
material and present, with significant differences, the same 
view of the Person and His History. Now, it may seem a 
strange inversion of the natural order, and certain to involve 
perversions of fact, that we should have had the speculative 
construction before the actual and personal history ; but it 
can only so seem to a hurried and inconsequent thinker. 
For 

i. The literature here follows the strict order of nature, or 
the laws of exact thought. There was at first no question 
as to the history of Jesus, His birth, life, doctrine, sufferings, 
death ; but there was from the very outset the sharpest dif- 
ferences as to what He was, why He was, and what He did. 



298 THE GOSPELS IN THE EPISTLES 

And this was a question that had to be settled in order that 
His Society should know whether it was to die or to live. 

ii. The extraordinary activity of apostolical thought con- 
cerning the Person did not imply neglect of the history ; on 
the contrary, it involved continual occupation with it. So 
much, indeed, is this the case that it is quite impossible to 
understand the Epistles without the Gospels ; the logic of 
the former assumes at every point the history of the latter. 
Were a scholar unacquainted with the Gospels to read the 
Pauline writings, with their references to the birth, descent, 
character, love, righteousness, grace, cross, death, and resur- 
rection of Christ, he would find them utterly unintelligible, not 
only because he did not know who this Christ was, where He 
had lived, what He had been and claimed to be, but also be- 
cause the very man who writes and the persons he writes to, 
with their special ideas, questions, and arguments, would be 
inexplicable without Him. And if the Gospels are so neces- 
sary to the reader of the Epistles, can the history they record 
have been less necessary to their writer ? And if so con- 
strued, do the Epistles not authenticate the history they 
assume, though not perhaps the books that describe it in the 
form in which they have come down to us ? 

iii. Criticism has enabled us to analyze the Synoptic Gos- 
pels, to discover the documents that underlie them, the use 
they have made of common sources, narrative and didactic, 
their relation to each other, and their respective modes of 
dealing with the history on the one hand, and the login, the 
notes or memoranda of addresses, parables, or conversations 
on the other. These things indicate the method of the his- 
torian : the men do not invent their material, but find, arrange, 
and set it in order. And here as the Gospels are needed to 
illuminate the Epistles, the Epistles are needed to supplement 
the Gospels and bring out their distinctive features. It is re- 
markable, indeed, how distinct their provinces are, how little 
of the oral or written material which the evangelists employ 






CONTEMPORARY HISTORY IN THE GOSPELS 299 

finds its way into the Epistles, and how few of the distinctive 
formulae or the special terms and problems which exercise 
the earlier apostolical writers are incorporated with the Gos- 
pels. And there is another and parallel fact to be explained. 
In 70 a.D. Jerusalem fell and with it the Jewish State. How- 
ever much it signified to the Jew, it signified to the Christian 
no less. It meant that the city that had refused to hear, and 
cast out, mocked and crucified the Christ, had perished in its 
pride, that God had avenged its guilt and vindicated His 
innocence. It meant that the home of the influences most 
hostile to the Church had been razed to the ground. Yet in 
the two later Synoptic Gospels the event leaves hardly a 
trace on the history. It may be involved in certain texts or 
references in the apocalyptic addresses, but these can be 
removed without seriously affecting the narrative. The effect 
on contemporary Judaism we can study in the pages of 
Josephus ; or, to cite a parallel case, we can see in Augus- 
tine's De Civitate Dei the influence which the fall of Rome 
exercised on both Christian and pagan thought. Yet the 
fall of Rome stood in no such obvious tragic relation to the 
church of Christ as did the fall of Jerusalem to His death ; 
and had no such evident and immediate significance for the reli- 
gion. That the Gospels were so little affected in texture and 
in matter by inner movements and outer events, is a point 
which students of cognate and contemporary influences in 
literature will be able to appreciate. 

iv. History does not lose but gain in accuracy and truth by 
being mediately rather than immediately written. The last 
and most trustworthy historian is not the eyewitness, but the 
man who can question him, and who can through the issue 
read character, action, and event with greater intelligence 
than he. The most accurate and informing history is not the 
diary, but the discourse of the writer who sees not simply the 
salient feature of each person or occurrence, but sees also each 
thing as it is and all the things together. And when we come 



300 THE EYEWITNESS AND THE HISTORIAN 

to study the Gospels together, we see how much time has 
done for the perspective which gives to each figure in the 
scene its due place and proportion. The sense of the causa- 
tion and connexion of events has grown in the Evangelists. 
Mark is more of the simple narrator than either of the other 
two ; he tells what he has heard rather than what he has 
seen, writes, as Peter was wont to speak, the simple yet pic- 
turesque words which describe Jesus " by the sea of Galilee," 1 
calling Peter and Andrew, " James the son of Zebedee, and 
John his brother," casting " the unclean spirit " out of the man, 
healing " Simon's wife's mother, who lay sick of a fever," 
sitting "at even, when the sun did set," with the sick and the 
possessed of devils around Him " and all the city gathered at 
the door." This is the thing an eyewitness, or the man who 
reports an eyewitness, can do, and Mark does it perfectly. 
His pen realizes the scene, and we see Jesus as He was, and 
as only a pen which followed the tongue of a speaker de- 
scribing experiences too vivid to be forgotten, can show Him. 
With Matthew and Luke the atmosphere is different ; Jesus 
is more an historical figure with roots in the past and relations 
in the present, and less a person loved for His own sake and 
with His reason in Himself. The antitheses are more sharply 
conceived ; in Matthew be fulfils the law and opposes the 
Pharisees, in Luke He befriends the poor, the publican, and 
the sinner ; and in both His world is, whether in retrospect 
or prospect, as large as the history of man. 

v. And here we may observe how the enlarged and enriched 
thought of the apostolical writings has affected the atmo- 
sphere and the setting as distinguished from the matter of the 
Gospels. The author of Matthew has affinities with the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, though his affinities are those of a Pales- 
tinian rather than a Roman or Alexandrian Jew ; but Luke's 
are more Pauline. Matthew, like Hebrews, reads the New 
Law through the old, though his symbolism is more historical 
1 Mark i. 16-34. 






THE HISTORIAN AS AN INTERPRETER 301 

than institutional, more in things and incidents than in ideas 
and forms. Hence his genealogy begins with Abraham, and 
comes down through David to Joseph the husband of Mary. 1 
The child is named Jesus, for " He shall save His people from 
their sins." 3 He "is born King of the Jews " 3 and every 
event of His childhood fulfils a prophecy. 4 And as then, so 
throughout. He begins His ministry like a new Moses 
proclaiming on the Mount a law which speaks in beatitudes 
rather than in curses, 5 yet He comes to fulfil the old and not 
to destroy it. 6 He forbids His disciples to go into the way of 
the Gentiles, for His mission is to the lost sheep of the house 
of Israel, 7 and His message tells that the kingdom of heaven 
has come. 8 Yet this particularism is only the prelude to a 
richer universalism. For many are to come from the east and 
the west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the 
kingdom of heaven, 9 while the sons of the kingdom are cast 
forth into outer darkness ; and His final commission is to make 
disciples of all nations. 10 Luke is more distinctly Hellenistic, 
but his Hellenism is that of the Greek rather than of the 
Jew. He interprets Jesus and His history through the Pauline 
idea of the Second Adam, and construes Him throughout in 
universal terms. His genealogy runs back to Adam, " the 
Son of God." n He is born as it were a citizen of the Roman 
Empire. 13 The message of His birth promises glory to God 
in the highest, and peace to man on earth. 13 He begins His 
ministry by reading a prophecy which identifies Him with 
the Servant of God and the cause of the poor and the 
oppressed. 14 And the great parables peculiar to Luke re- 
peat and emphasize these ideas. He impersonates in the 
Good Samaritan Christ's everlasting rebuke to the vanity and 

1 Matt. Li-16. * i. 21. 8 ii. 2. 

* i. 22 ; ii. 5, 15, 17, 23. s v. 3-12. 6 v. 17. 

1 x. 5, 6. 8 iv. 17 ; x. 7 ; xiii. 24, 31, 33, 44, 45, 47. 

* viii. 11, 12 ; cf. xxi. 43, xxii. 1-14. 10 xxviii. 19. 
11 Luke iii. 38. la ii. 1,2. 13 ii. 14. u iv. 18 



302 LUKE'S DISTINCTIVE MESSAGE 

heartlessness of the priest and the Levite. 1 He leaves the 
Pharisee speaking his own shame in the temple, while He 
sends the publican home justified. 2 He bids the everlasting 
Fatherhood in the man who had two sons, both graceless, 
yet both sons still, rebuke the caste of the scribe and the 
isolation of the sectary. 3 And in the story of the rich man 
and Lazarus he gives dignity to poverty and makes all 
wealth which is proud of itself as mere wealth feel vacant 
and vain. 4 The same ideas are embodied and made ar- 
ticulate in such incidents, also distinctive of Luke, as the 
woman of the city, a sinner, in the house of Simon the 
Pharisee, with its lesson pointed by the appended parable ; 5 
the conversion of the chief publican, Zacchaeus, 6 and the 
scene in the house of the sisters Martha and Mary. 7 These 
are all though peculiar to Luke, yet authentic and charac- 
teristic. Mark would hardly have seen their significance, 
nor would the original witness whose version he repeats. 
Matthew had no eye for them, because they did not help 
to unfold his leading idea. But Luke, with a finer imagina- 
tion, a more skilful pen and a wider outlook than either, 
preserved acts and words whose loss would have made us 
appreciably poorer; yet because they are so germane to the 
mind and purpose of the historian, they but add an illus- 
tration to the point, that the more a man brings to a history 
the more he can find in it, and also the better help us to find 
more there. 

§ IV. The Religion and the Literature 

I. The criticism of the literature may, then, be necessary to 
the discussion of our problem, but it is not by itself sufficient 
for its solution. On the contrary, it may be so pursued as to 
make any reasonable solution impossible. Thus a recent critic 
has found in the synoptists only five " absolutely credible pas- 

1 x. 25-37. 2 xviii. 9-14. s xv. 11-32. 4 xvi. 14, 19, 31. 

5 vii. 36-50. 6 xix. 2-10. 7 x. 38-42. 



HISTORY AND THE MODERN CRITIC 303 

sages about Jesus in general." * These are His refusal to be 
called "good," for "no one is good save God only" 2 ; the blas- 
phemy against the Son of Man, which " shall be forgiven " 3 ; 
His relation to His kinsfolk when they held Him to be beside 
Himself 4 ; the profession of ignorance as to the day and the 
hour which were known only of the Father 5 ; and the cry of 
desertion on the cross. 6 To these he adds four passages " on 
the miracles of Jesus." The refusal to work a sign 7 ; the 
inability because of unbelief to do any mighty work at 
Nazareth 8 ; the warning of the disciples to " beware of the 
leaven of the Pharisees and Herod," 9 which is, as it were, the 
title of a parable turned into a miracle ; and the message to 
the Baptist touching His miracles 10 ; where Jesus is made 
to speak " not of the physically but of the spiritually blind, 
lame, leprous, deaf, dead." 11 These nine passages are called 
" the foundation-pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus." 
But vyhat claim have they to be regarded as a solid basis for ' 
any " scientific life " which must explain not only the life that 
ended on the Cross, but also the work accomplished by the 
Crucified in andjbr mankind? They are mainly negative ; and 
it is only when viewed through a larger context and an atmo- 
sphere which they themselves do not create, that they gain any 
positive significance whatever. They show what Jesus was 
not, what He could not know or do, they do not show what 
He was or did. Yet of all real things the most positively 
real, the most efficient and continuous in its recreative action, 
is His Person ; and to attempt to explain it by nine negatives, 
made the more absolute by appearing in one or two cases in 
a positive form, is only to resolve it into a more darksome 

1 Schmiedel, Encycl. Bibl., pp. 1881-1883. 2 Mark x. 17, 18. 

8 Matt. xii. 31, 32. * Mark iii. 21. 

5 Mark xiii. 32. 6 Mark xv. 34 ; Matt, xxvii. 46. 

7 Mark viii. 12 ; Matt. xii. 39; cf. xvi. 4; Luke xi. 29. 

8 Mark vi. 5, 6 ; cf. Matt. xv. 38. 9 Mark viii. 14-18 ; cf. Matt.xvi. 6. 
10 Matt. xi. 5 ; Luke vii. 22. " Encycl. Bibl., 1883. 



304 THE TEACHER A SOVEREIGN PERSONALITY 

mystery than before. And this is only a type of the illusion 
that mistakes critical ingenuity for historical science. Another 
and more common is that which seeks in the words of Jesus 
the entire truth as to Himself and His mission. Truth is 
there, but truth is conditioned by the medium it employs and 
the minds that hear it as well as by the mind that speaks it 
We cannot indeed know too much of His mind and thought ; 
but, let us frankly say it, it is not here that His sole pre- 
eminence or our main problem lies. His work and mean- 
ing as a religious Teacher belongs to exegesis and compara- 
tive literary criticism ; but our discussion is philosophical 
and historical as well as theological, for it relates to the 
position and function of Christ as a sovereign personality in 
religion. As a teacher there are many men in many lands 
and times with whom He may be compared ; but as a creative 
and sovereign personality there are in the whole of history 
only two or three, if indeed there are so many, with any 
claim to stand by His side. As a Teacher He is a natural 
person, with historical antecedents, a social environment, a 
religious ancestry, and a position honourable but not unique 
amid the great masters of mind ; but as a sovereign per- 
sonality He is a new Being, without father, or mother, or 
genealogy, separate, supreme, creating by His very ap- 
pearing a new spiritual type or order. As a Teacher we 
can easily conceive Him as a Jew and a peasant, the lineal 
descendant of the prophets and near of kin to the rabbis of 
Israel ; but there is no harder intellectual task than to relate 
the sovereign personality to the Jewish peasant, his ante- 
cedents and environment. But this correlation is the very 
thing which must be attempted if all the phenomena are to 
be explained ; for if anything is certain, it is this : — the 
teaching of Jesus, however its qualities may be described or 
appraised, can never by itself explain the power of Christ, 
the reign, the diffusion, the continuance, and the achievements 
of the Christian religion. And these are the things which 



NOT JESUS BUT CHRIST 305 

stand in need of explanation ; not simply what Jesus thought 
and why He thought it, but why men came so to think con- 
cerning Him as to create the religion which bears His name. 
Can the religion be without the idea of the Christ which 
made it ? And was this idea a mythical creation, a mystic 
dream, an ignorant superstition, the inference of an imperious 
but illiterate logic ? Or if not, what was it ? 

2. There are, then, distinctions both of issue and of funda- 
mental principle between our problem and the questions raised 
by the literary and historical criticisms of the New Testament. 
These may be said to move within a special period and to 
be concerned with its literature and its contemporary history. 
They have for their aim to show us what manner of person 
Jesus of Nazareth was, whence He had come, how and under 
what influences He had been formed, how He lived, behaved, 
thought, spoke ; how He was handled, spoken to, judged ; 
what character He realized, what fate He encountered, 
what evil He suffered. But in all this they enquire simply 
concerning an empirical person, whom they look at from the 
standpoint of empirical history. In the strict sense Jesus 
did not so much create the Christian religion as cause it to 
be created. When He died, the creative process had only 
begun. Though He had so exemplified the spirit and char- 
acter of the religion as to be entitled to the name of the 
first Christian, yet it is one thing to embody an ideal and 
another to constitute the faith which is to secure its embodi- 
ment. What the men who had followed Him believed Him 
to have accomplished, is written in their history. They did 
not mean to cease to be Jews ; their discipleship did not 
divorce them from their ancestral worship, its customs, its 
sacred places and seasons. They frequented the temple, 
observed the Jewish hours of prayer, the regulations as to 
meats, circumcision, purification, sacrifices even; 1 and seemed 

1 Acts of Apostles ii. 46 ; iii. 1 ; v. 42 ; x. 14 ; xv. 5 ; xxi. 26. 
P.C.R. 20 



306 THE PERSON, BOOK, AND RELIGION 

indeed to contemplate nothing more than to add another to 
the many sects which had made themselves at home in 
Judaism. What changed their outlook and action was the 
interpretation of Christ's person ; and it was by something 
more divine than a sure instinct that it was made to occupy 
a larger space in the New Testament than even the words 
of Jesus. By the time the Gospels came to be written the 
religion had become a reality, the creative process was well 
advanced, if not completed. And what gives to the Gospels 
their peculiar significance is that they are Lives of Jesus by 
men who believed that Christ had created Christianity. The 
empirical person is, though without losing His historical en- 
vironment, yet transfigured into a transcendental personality. 
The natural is neither abolished nor depreciated, but it is 
read in terms of the supernatural. The struggle of the 
modern spirit is the exact converse of this ; it is to get 
behind the faith of the Evangelists, and read the history they 
wrote with the vision they had before their eyes were opened. 
Yet there is a history which the book has made as well as a 
history which it records ; and it is doubtful whether it be the 
note of the historical spirit to take a book out of the history 
it has made and to study it as if all its significance lay in the 
history that made it. For it is the faith which the book 
embodies more than the facts it states, that has placed upon 
its brow the crown of an illuminative history. Only as we 
read it in this faith can we know it as a book of religion, and 
it is as such a book that we here seek to know it. We do 
not, indeed, forget that the book has a natural history of 
its own, according to which it must, like any other piece 
of literature, be rationally judged ; all we here desire to 
emphasize is the fact that the very process which produced 
it created a religion, and the book is not justly or even 
critically studied if this double process is forgotten. 






ARE THEY NATURAL OR SUPERNATURAL? 307 

§ V. The Founder and the Religion 

1. The point of view here occupied does not seem to us 
either unscientific or uncritical ; on the contrary, it is the 
standpoint to which philosophy has driven us. We have 
already examined some of the assumptions which underlie 
the modern belief in the inviolability of natural law, 1 but with 
us it is a fixed principle that violation of law, properly so 
called, is a thing impossible to God. The distinction between 
the natural and the supernatural, as it meets us in the field 
of nature, we have also considered ; 2 but now we must review 
it as it confronts us in the field of history. The terms, 
indeed, as used here denote no true antithesis, but express 
ideas that are rather complementary than opposed. The 
supernatural is not identical with the extraordinary, the 
abnormal, or the miraculous ; nor is the natural synonymous 
with the regular, the orderly, or the uniform. Each may be 
said to be the other under a different or changed aspect. 
The supernatural is the ideal, the universal, the causal exist- 
ence, the permanent reality, or however we may choose to 
name it, which binds nature and man together, and determines 
the tendencies that reign in history, as well as the ideas that 
govern men. The natural is the apparent, the phenomenal, 
the unit in its isolation and distinctness, the thing in its 
separateness as opposed to the organism which is a living 
whole. Hence the natural by itself, if by itself it can be 
conceived, is uniform, therefore unprogressive and uncreative ; 
its changes can be expressed in the terms of physical 
equivalence, but not of moral motive or spiritual impulse. 
But when it becomes the visible image of the supernatural, 
the body to its soul, it grows creative, progressive, ceases to 
be uniform, and becomes as varied yet as orderly as a move- 
ment of the reason. And this relationship is most perfectly 
realized in history, for here the form the supernatural assumes 

1 Ante, pp. 23 fF. s Ante, p. 56. 



308 THE PERSON AND THE HISTORY 

is the personal, and the person is by nature at once empirical 
and transcendental. As empirical the person is a unit ; as 
transcendental he belongs to a whole, and thinks in the terms 
of the universal. As empirical he is a creature of time and 
space, comes of a given race, is born at a given time in 
a given place to a given family, inherits a given past, is 
fashioned by a given present, and is a factor of a given 
future ; but as transcendental his affinities are all with the 
eternal, and all his work is for it. Yet these things are not 
opposites, they are the integral and constituent parts of a 
single being ; but the factors are not always equal, or as forces 
in equilibrium. Now the one and now the other rules ; and 
the more the higher rules the lower, the more is the person 
the vehicle of the universal, i.e. the larger is the part of God 
in the making of the man and in his actions. Without the 
natural the supernatural would have no foothold in history, 
no means of translating its ideals into realities, or of guiding 
and impelling upward the life of man ; without the super- 
natural the natural would constitute no order and know no 
movement towards a moral end. Whether, then, there is 
anything supernatural in a history is not a matter to be 
decided by the play of critical formulae on a -literature, nor by 
the study of periods or events in isolation. It belongs to the 
whole, and is to be determined as regards any special person 
by his worth for the whole and by the degree in which he is 
a factor of its good. Applied to Jesus Christ this means 
that He is not a problem in local but in general history, not 
in a special but in all literature, not in one but in universal 
religion ; and that if He is to be interpreted, it must be in 
the terms of humanity, and not merely in those of Judea or 
Jewish Hellenism. He is a natural Being, or He could not 
be historical ; but He is also supernatural, otherwise He could 
not hold His sovereign position, or exercise His universal 
functions. And these, as matters of experience and not 
simply of speculation, must be enquired into as real things. 



THE PROBLEMS THEY FORMULATE 309 

2. If the problem, as now explicated and defined, be for- 
mulated for purposes of discussion, it will be found to fall 
into three main questions. 

I. The historical person and action of Jesus : what He 
was, what He designed to be and to do, what He became, 
and what He did. The discussion will here be concerned 
chiefly, though not exclusively, with the representation of 
Him in the Synoptic Gospels. 

II. The interpretation of Jesus as the Christ: or how His 
Society conceived Him, and what it became through conceiv- 
ing Him as it did. In this case we shall be mainly occupied 
with the apostolical writings, under which is included the 
Gospel according to John. 

III. How the religion which came to be through the union 
of the historical action with the theological interpretation of 
His Person, stands related to the idea of religion given in the 
nature of man and unfolded in the course of his history. 
This question will carry us back into the fields of the com- 
parative History and Philosophy of Religion. 



aptteiv yap oi/xai Kavri pvpicov piav 

■tyvyr\v i"dS' eKTivovcrav, r\v evvovs Trapfj. — SOPHOCLES. 

Dans l'espace de temps qui s'est ecoule de la mort d'Auguste a la mort 
de Marc-Aurele, une religion nouvelle s'est produite dans le monde ; 
elle s'appelle le christianisme. L'essence de cette religion consiste a 
croire qu'une grande manifestation celeste s'est faite en la personne de 
Jesus de Nazareth, etre divin qui, apres une vie toute surnaturelle, a ete 
mis a mort par les Juifs, ses compatriotes, et est ressuscite le troisieme 
jour. — Renan. 

Das haben vor Zeiten die hochsten Theologen gethan, dass sie von der 
Menschheit Christi geflogen sind zu der Gottheit und sich allein an 
dieselbige gehanget ; — ich bin vor Zeiten auch ein solcher Doktor gewe- 
sen, dass ich hab die Menschheit ausgeschlossen ; — aber man muss so 
steigen zu der Gottheit und sich daran halten, dass man die Menschheit 
Christi nicht verlasse. — Luther. 

Christus konnte nur der Sohn der Jungfrau sein, er ist selbst eine 
Jungfrau im Gemuthe, gleich dem ersten Adam in der Schopfung. — Jacob 
Boehme. 

Dass alle Lehren und Vorschriften, welche sich in der christlichen 
Kirche entwickeln, nur dadurch ein allgemein-gultiges Ansehn erhalten, 
dass sie auf Christum zuriickgefuhrt werden, griindet sich nur auf seine 
vollkommne Urbildlichkeit in allem, was mit der Kraft des Gottesbewusst- 
seins in Verbindung steht. — SCHLEIERMACHER. 

Die Krafte der ewigen Gottheit offenbarten sich in Christo nicht neben 
den Kraften seiner Menschheit, nicht als iibermenschliche ; sondern eben 
in den Kraften seiner Menschheit, eben darin, dass seine menschlichen 
Krafte ubematurlich, d. h. iiber die durch den Siindfall depravirte Natur 
hinausgehende waren und er dieser depravirten Natur schlechthin iiber- 
legen war, so dass sie, wo und wann er wirken wollte, fur sein Konnen 
nirgends eine Schranke bildete. — Ebrard. 

Hat es jemals einen schlechthin originalen Menschen gegeben, so ist 
es Jesus gewesen. 

Vor Christo hatten wir von Gott gehort, in Christo haben wir ihn 
gesehen. — Rothe. 

Jesus est la plus haute de ces colonnes qui montrent a l'homme d'ou 
il vient et ou il doit tendre. En lui s'est condense tout ce qu'il y a de 
bon et d'eleve dans notre nature. — Renan. 



310 



PART I 

THE FOUNDER AS AN HISTORICAL PERSON, OR JESUS 
AS HE APPEARS IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 

CHAPTER I 

HOW HIS PERSON IS CONCEIVED 

IN the Synoptic Gospels, and here we may also include the 
Fourth, the two views of Jesus which we are accustomed 
to distinguish as the natural and the supernatural are alike 
represented. It is through their conflict that the simple 
story of a humble and beautiful life is turned into the 
supreme drama of history. The one view is worked out 
with conspicuous fidelity to its last logical consequences by 
men who honestly believed it ; the other view is presented 
with ingenuous simplicity, though with varying degrees of 
conscious and consistent completeness, by the writers, who, 
either out of personal knowledge or from collected and 
sifted materials, attempted to tell the story of His life. The 
views so stand together as to compel us to compare them as 
respects their adequacy and historical truth. 

§ I. The Natural View of Jesus in the Gospels 

I. What this view involves has just been stated •} it con- 
ceives man as an empirical unit, and may be said to emphasize 
six factors of being and character : race, family, place, time, 
education, and opportunity. Race denotes man's . whole 
inheritance as a human being, the mental endowment which 

1 Ante, pp. 307-8. 

3" 



312 NATURAL FACTORS OF CHARACTER 

belongs to his special stock, the experience that has through 
long ages and by ceaseless struggles for the means of sub- 
sistence and against the enemies that threaten them, been 
accumulated by a given people for transference to its sons. 
Family describes the man's immediate ancestry, the qualities 
that come to him by blood and birth, the class from which 
he springs, whether governing, servile, professional, or indus- 
trial, with all that these signify as to transmitted faculty and 
advantage or disadvantage in beginning the struggle to live. 
Place speaks of geographical and social environment, the 
atmosphere which the man breathes and which quickens or 
deadens the pulses of his body and mind. Time is but a 
name for a reigning spirit, a mood, which affects the man's 
temper and soul as the place affects his physical organism, and 
which makes him love freedom or fear the king, breathe high 
hopes or nurse despondency and despair. Education is that 
study of the past which gives mastery over the present, the 
development of faculty by skilled hands, teaching a man to 
make the most and best of himself by telling him what men 
in other ages have thought and achieved. And opportunity is 
the chance which comes to a man to use to the uttermost 
what he is, what he has inherited, and what he has acquired. 
The most that the natural view expects from a man is that 
he be equal to the sum of all the conditions concerned in his 
making. If he transcends them, then we are landed either 
in an insolubility or in the recognition of an unknown factor 
which may be named personal genius, but can hardly be 
described as normal or according to law. In any case this 
appeal to an undiscovered or incalculable cause differs only 
in name from the appeal to the supernatural. 

Whether these natural factors of personality are equal to 
the explanation of Jesus may be appear in the process of the 
discussion. At present we have only to note that while He 
lived the natural was the obvious view of Him, taken as a 
matter of course by men of all classes and kinds. In His own 






THE NATURAL VIEW GENERAL 313 

city, where He had lived like any other child subject unto his 
parents (vvoTacao/xevo'i auToi?, i.e. toi<; yovevcri,v), ] the mul- 
titude (pi ttoWol) even after He had achieved fame, described 
Him as "the carpenter," the son of Mary, and refused to dis- 
tinguish Him in any special way from either His brothers or 
His sisters. 2 He was but " Joseph's son," even as they. 3 
To Himself Mary, when she found Him in the temple, said, 
" Child, Thy father and I sought thee sorrowing." 4 The very 
disciples did not at first think of Him otherwise. Philip 
named Him " Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph," 5 Peter 
rebuked Him, 6 Judas betraj ed Him, and the rest appealed to 
Him as Rabbi, the Master, 7 most familiar of names to the men 
of Israel. Even His own famih thought of Him as one they 
could claim and coerce ; and justified their attempt to force 
Him by saying, " He is beside Himself." 8 To the scribes 
He was but as one who blasphemed when He spoke of 
forgiving sins. 9 The Pharisees explained His miracles of 
healing by demoniacal possession, 10 a charge as common and 
as natural then as witchcraft used to be in our own darker 
ages, The very notion that He could wake the ruler's 
daughter from the sleep which was called death, roused the 
crowd to scornful laughter. 11 Indeed, so rooted was this 
natural view of Him, that we need to remember it before 
we can be just to the men who opposed Him and who com- 
passed His death. They judged Jesus to be a common man, 
holding that any who believed otherwise were deceived. 12 
His very home condemned Him, for out of Galilee came no 
prophet. 15 He is to the Pharisees but an itinerant sophist, so 
little instructed that even the Herodians were expected to 

1 Luke ii. 51 ; cf. 41, 43. * Mark vi. 3 ; Matt. xiii. 55. 

8 Luke iv. 22 ; John vi. 42. 4 Luke ii. 48. 5 John i. 45. 

6 Mark viii. 32 ; Matt. xvi. 22. 7 Mark ix. 5, xi. 21 ; John i. 38. 

8 Mark iii. 21 ; cf. 31-35 ; Matt. xii. 46-49, xiii. 57 ; Luke viii. 19-21. 

9 Mark ii. 7 ; Matt. ix. 3. 10 Matt. ix. 34. 
11 Mark v. 39 ; Matt. ix. 24. 12 John vii. 47. 
13 John vii. 52. 



314 THE CHIEF PRIEST AND JESUS 

ensnare Him. 1 He was despised as the friend of publicans 
and sinners, 2 watched that He might be accused as a 
Sabbath-breaker, 3 allowed to go at large simply from fear 
of the people. 4 The Sadducee, though he was not, like the 
scribe, a trained disputant, yet had a logical puzzle of his 
own concerning marriage in the resurrection, and with it he 
tried to perplex Jesus, 5 just as he was wont to confound the 
Pharisee. All these men judged Him by the standards they 
applied to one another ; and as they judged, they handled 
Him, and He died at their hands just as any ordinary person 
would have died. In all this there may be matter that requires 
explanation, but nothing calling for either surprise or censure. 
2. But the two men whose conduct is most completely 
governed by this natural view are Caiaphas and Pilate, for 
these two so believed it as to become the joint authors of 
the tragedy of the Cross. Their relation to this tragedy was 
indeed very different ; the one was the author of the plot, the 
other the cause of the catastrophe. Caiaphas was a Sadducee, 
an aristocrat in family and feeling, head of the Jewish Church, 
and an authority in the State, with the instincts and habits 
of the ruler controlled by the mind and exercised in the man- 
ner of the ecclesiastic. In the Sanhedrim his characteristic 
qualities had room for the freest and most effective play, 
especially when it met in such confusion and alarm as 
followed upon the events at Bethany and the triumphal 
entry." For it is evident that Jesus had, in spite of Himself, 
become a political personage. In Israel religion and politics 
were not two things, but one and the same ; for the name that 
denoted the strongest faith of the people expressed also their 
highest hope, their yearning after freedom from the yoke 
of the alien. The Messiah was expected to vanquish Caesar ; 

1 Matt. xxii. 15 ff. ; Mark xii. 13. 2 Luke v. 30 ; xv. 2 ; Mark ii. 16. 
3 Luke vi. 7 ; Mark iii. 6. * Luke xx. 19, 20. 

5 Mark xii. 18-27 ; Luke xx. 27-40. 

6 John xi. 47 ; cf. Mark xii. 13-17 ; xiv. 1-2 ; Luke xx. 17-26. 



JESUS AND THE POPULACE 315 

and expectancy easily translates itself into action, especi- 
ally when it lives in the heart of a passionate race. Rulers 
who do not believe fear profoundly the people who do ; 
the statesmanship that is calculation dreads the enthusiasm 
which is ready to sacrifice its all in order that it may attain 
its end, without being able, or indeed caring, to balance 
or to measure the forces which oppose it. And in this 
council two different kinds of unbelief sat facing each other 
in solemn and unmasked fear. There was the unbelief of the 
Sadducee, who knew Moses but not the prophets, who neither 
expected nor desired any other Anointed than the priesthood 
which stood to him as the finest blossom of his race. And 
there was the unbelief of the Pharisee, who preached the 
Messiah that was to come, but who thought it best that 
the Pharisee should believe in the preaching while the people 
believed in the Messiah. 

And the circumstances of the moment made action by 
the multitude on the ground of their faith at once most 
probable and most inconvenient. The Passover was at hand, 
Jerusalem was filled by an expectant crowd, massed, as it 
were, into a colossal person, sensitive on the outside to 
the softest touch of national hope or fear, while within, 
like a fire in the bones, there burned the fierce passion 
for the religion of their ancient race. Through this crowd 
the sudden fame of Jesus swept, fused it, inspired it, moved 
it by the delirious hope that here, at last, was the Messiah 
come to break in pieces the heathen oppressor, and to 
purge the holy city from the defilement of his presence. 1 
The Council knew the people, and also knew the procurator, 2 
whom it seemed to see sitting in his palace, jealous, vindic- 
tive, watching as with a hundred eyes for an occasion to 
interfere. And it stood bewildered between the rival terrors : 
on the one hand, the uncalculating and incalculable passion 

1 Matt. xxi. 8-1 1 ; Luke xix. 35-40, 47, 48 ; John xii. 12-15. 

2 Luke xiii. 1. 



316 THE STATECRAFT OF CAIAPHAS 

of the crowd, and, on the other, the cold omnipotence of 
Rome, here so easily roused and so pitiless when provoked. 
Just then Caiaphas stood up, the one masterful spirit who 
could command the storm. He had the significant yet dark 
distinction of being " High Priest that fateful year," and was 
about to fulfil his office in a sense and manner he little 
dreamed of. He spoke with a certain imperious scorn words 
that may be paraphrased thus : x " Ye know nothing at all : 
the public safety is the supreme law, and must not be en- 
dangered by the passion which in the populace is a fitful 
madness, easily kindled, but only to be cunningly quenched. 
In this case it can best be quenched through its cause ; 
smite the hero the populace admires, and their admiration 
will die into disgust." The words seemed those of gifted 
sagacity ; Jesus was nothing, the mere creation of a fana- 
ticism blinded by many disappointments ; and, though He 
was guiltless of crime, yet it was the high expedient of 
statesmanship to save the people by making an end of Him. 
And if He were only the common person the priest and the 
Council conceived Him to be, who will say that the expedient 
was foolish or unfitted for its purpose? For what is the 
wisdom of statecraft but ingenuity in the invention, not of 
just, but of effectual means to desired ends ? 

It is from this point of view that the policy of the Council 
and the method of the chief priest ought to be judged. 
Grant hat Jesus was the mere natural man they conceived 
Him to be, and we do not see how they could have acted 
otherwise. They were not heroic men, but they meant well 
to their land and State, and feared above everything the anger 
or suspicion of Rome ; for they had daily to face a governor 
who was more imperious than his master, and to watch sol- 
diers who cared for nothing save his commands. And while 
they knew and trembled, the people were ignorant and with- 
out fear. In the soul of Caiaphas concern for the nation, the 

1 John xi. 49, 50. 



THE COUNCIL AND ROME 317 

temple, the priesthood, the worship, was uppermost ; and he 
was anxious to give the Roman no occasion to doubt his own 
or his people's loyalty. Possibly, too, he was not disinclined 
to read the Pharisaic opposition a needed lesson. He .would 
say to them, as it were : " You see what danger lies in your 
theories, and how easily they may become explosive forces in 
the heart of the populace. You teach that Jehovah alone 
ought to be King over this people ; that Caesar is a heathen 
and an oppressor ; and that when God pleases to send His 
Messiah freedom will be achieved. They think that this Jesus 
is the Messiah you talk of, and wait only a sign from him 
to revolt. And, though he seems a peaceably-inclined, well- 
meaning, and even innocent person, yet some event which 
they may take as a sign may happen without premeditation 
or warning. Chance may bring it, and we may any moment 
find Jerusalem in arms against Rome. There is nothing so 
safe as a sound conservatism, which, though not at all con- 
tented with what is, yet fears more what may be ; and so does 
its best to maintain the actual lest the attempt to realize 
the ideal become a catastrophe which shall engulf the whole 
nation. Let us therefore do our utmost to prove our loyalty 
to Caesar ; charge this man with being an agitator, an enemy 
of order and of Rome, surrender him as a pledge of our 
obedience to the Emperor ; and so out of our very trouble 
pluck the approval of our conquerors, the peace of our State, 
and the continuance of our authority. ' It is expedient for 
you that one man should die for the people, and that the 
whole nation perish not.' " On his own premisses, there 
seemed to be statesmanship in his policy ; on the Evange- 
lists', his policy appeared a devil's counterfeit of the purpose 
and mind of God. 

3. The same conception as to the status and nature of Jesus 
which governed the policy of Caiaphas possessed the mind 
of Pilate. He is an unconscious actor in the drama, with 
only the dimmest sense that anything extraordinary is pro- 



318 ROME IMPERSONATED IN PILATE 

ceeding, or that he is playing more than his ordinary part. 1 
There is something fateful and pathetic in the position and 
action of this man ; when we think of him, we feel that jus- 
tice must be blind, or she would pity too much to be just. 
Here is the only Roman known to history who saw Jesus ; 
but his eyes had no vision in them, and so he looked as one 
who did not see, or so saw as only to misjudge and mis- 
handle. In him Rome was impersonated. Out of him 
looked her imperial strength, in him dwelt for a subject 
people her statesmanship. As he faced the Jews he thought 
of Caesar, and ruled the subject race with his feet firm planted 
on an empire which stretched westward to the Pillars of 
Hercules, northward to the forests of Germany and the 
outermost coasts of Gaul. And what were the Jews to him ? 
Turbulent men, intolerable for their intolerant superstition, a 
people that the imperial image on a banner provoked into 
madness, 2 who would not allow the shadow of a Gentile to 
fall on their temple, though, indeed, that temple was so poor 
a place as to be unadorned by the statue of any god. Still 
it was necessary, the people being conquered, to rule them 
considerately — if they behaved ; but if they were disaffected 
at this high feast and showed themselves seditious, or even 
if they only threatened to be, then in Caesar's name let 
their blood be mingled with their sacrifices. 3 And what 
did Jesus seem to this man as He stood before him ? A 
Jew, only a Jew, though most unlike the typical Jew in the 
gentleness of His bearing, the mystery of His speech, and 
the glamour of soul which the Roman felt touch his heart, 
now waking him to mockery, now moving him to pity. 4 He 
knew the chief priest and the Council ; and he had for them 
the sort of contempt the conqueror feels for those of the con- 
quered who seek by excessive suppleness to keep themselves 

1 Matt, xxvii. 24 ; John xviii. 31, 37, xix. 6. 

2 Josephus, Antiq. xviii. iii. 1-2. 3 Luke xiii. I. 
4 Luke xxiii. 4-7, 13-22 ; John xix. 8-9, 12, 19-22. 



IS TOUCHED WITH PITY 319 

in place, mollifying with the one hand the strong-willed victor, 
and soothing with the other the irritable impotence of the 
vanquished. Jesus was a being of another order than these 
men ; and though Pilate, listening to His discourse, was so 
vividly, by contrast, reminded of Epicurus and his great 
Roman disciple, as to throw out the jesting question, " What 
is truth ? " yet he turned away with the feeling that he would 
save Him, — unless, indeed, the obstinate unreason of this 
most excitable people made it too troublesome. 1 For Rome 
did not mind the shedding of blood when it was necessary ; 
but it did not love too frequent bloodshed in any province, 
Caesar being then prone to suspect some fault in the gover- 
nor. So it might happen, if His death were needed to keep 
the turbulent quiet, that it would be easiest to let Him die — 
worse things were done daily in the amphitheatre under the 
Emperor's own eye. 

The successive scenes of the drama are full of the 
incidents which are character, — the priests anxious to 
make out Jesus to be the political personage their policy 
required Him to be, Pilate wishful to regard Him as a 
religious person in whom Rome had no concern, though the 
Jewish law might condemn Him ; while Jesus moves in the 
midst aloof from them all and within a world of His own. 
According to both the Synoptists and John, the chief priest 
asks Him as to His teaching in general, and specially touch- 
ing the temple, His own person and claims, but nothing 
concerning any political aim or purpose. 2 Yet, when they 
bring Him before the Procurator, their only charge is political. 
Pilate at first declines to hear them : " Take Him yourselves, 
and judge Him according to your law." 3 But they deftly 
accentuate the political accusation which Pilate could under- 
stand, and was bound to take notice of: " He has claimed to 

1 John xviii. 38, 39. 

2 Matt. xxvi. 59-65 ; Mark xiv. 55-63 ; Luke xxii. 66-71 ; John xviii. 
19-24. 3 John xviii. 31. 



320 THE VISION OF PILATE 

be King of the Jews." 1 But the very gravity of the charge 
proved to the Roman its absurdity; he could not take it 
seriously, and suspected that some religious idea or sectarian 
spite lurked under its political form. He tried to make out 
the truth by questioning Jesus, who would not disown His 
ideal Kinghood in terms which would have falsified their 
charge. 2 The definition He gave only the more bewildered 
the governor, and tempted him to conceal under a question 
that jested a suspicion that was growing into a certainty. 3 
He next tried, by showing the pitiful figure of the scourged 
and mocked King, to awaken them to the sense of the absurd 
in their charge, but they would not be turned aside. In their 
fear of Jesus they lost fear of Pilate, and assailed him where 
they knew he was weakest : " If thou release this man, thou 
art not Caesar's friend," for had not Jesus, by making Himself 
a King, set Himself up as a rival over against Caesar ? 4 

And so we see Pilate standing in dubious and deliberative 
mood, now scornfully temporizing with the multitude, and 
now patronizing Jesus, befriending Him with a sort of lofty 
condescension which was touched with regret, looking Him, 
as he vainly thought, through and through, though never 
failing to read the mind and motives of His accusers. But 
even when most convinced of the innocence of Jesus, he 
is perfectly sure of His mere manhood, though it be of a 
type rare in the genus fanatic. So he believes himself to 
have power, though he thinks Jesus has none. But let us 
imagine that, in the very moment when he boasted his 
power to crucify or to release, 5 a lucid vision had come 
to him, and that he had beheld the centuries before him 
unroll their wondrous secret. In less than eighty years 
he sees in every city of the Roman world societies of men 
and women meeting in the name of this Jesus and singing 
praises to Him as to God ; while so powerful has His Name 

1 Mark xv. 2 ; John xviii. 33 ; xix. 21-22. 2 Mark xv. 3 ; Luke xxiii. 3. 
8 John xviii. 36-38. 4 John xix. 12. * John xix. 10. 






AND HIS AWAKENING 321 

grown in some provinces that the very temples are deserted, 
and the most famous governor of the day writes to ask the 
Emperor what policy he is to pursue. Then he sees Rome, 
astonished and angry at the might of the Name, lose her 
proud tolerance, become vindictive, brutal, even turning per- 
secutor, and making the profession of the Name a crime 
punishable with death. But all the resources of the Empire 
are powerless against the Name ; the legions that had carried 
the Roman Eagles into the inaccessible regions lying round 
the civilized world, forcing the tide of barbarism back before 
them, here availed nothing. And he beholds in less than 
three hundred years the symbol of the Cross on which he 
was about to crucify this Jesus, float victoriously from the 
capitol ; while the Emperor sits, not amid patricians in the 
Roman Senate, but in a council of Christian pastors, all with- 
out pride of birth, all without names the Senate would have 
honoured, many maimed, some even eyeless, disfigured by the 
tortures Rome had inflicted in her vain attempt to extinguish 
the infamous thing. In another hundred years he sees the 
very empire herself fallen, while in her seat sits one whose only 
claim to rule is that he represents the Crucified ; and because he 
does so, he builds up a kingdom beside which Rome at her 
vastest was but as a hand-breadth, and the city that had been 
proudly called eternal was in duration only as the child of a day. 
And if Pilate had waked from his dream as suddenly as he had 
fallen into it, and looked at Jesus sitting before him mocked 
and buffeted, helpless in the face of the howling mob, deserted 
of man, manifestly forsaken of His God, what could he have 
said but this ? " What foolish things dreams are ! Their world 
is a sort of topsy-turvydom of reality ; for were this vision of 
mine true, then the invisible kingdom of this Man would be the 
only real empire, and my claim of power either to crucify or to 
release Him a vain and empty boast ! Happily the cross will 
soon restore us all to sanity, and show the vanity of the dream." 
1 Pliny, Epist. 96. 
P.C R. 21 



322 AN IMMIRACULOUS PASSION BECOMES 

4. This much, then, and no more, Caiaphas and Pilate saw- 
in Jesus ; and as they saw they judged ; and as they saw and 
judged, so did all the men of cultivated intelligence in their 
time and place. They were not unreasonable, nor without 
integrity, but honest after their kind ; only, like all who are 
consciously and proudly men of the world, they made their 
experience the measure of other men and all their possibili- 
ties. I wonder how many of all the sagacious intellects who 
govern the modern State and meddle in politics, national 
and international, or how many of the disciplined minds who 
cultivate in our day the natural and historical sciences would, 
similarly situated, have judged differently ; certainly not 
many — possibly not even one ; for the modern idea of the 
limitations of nature is more positive than the scientific 
belief in its potencies or in the capabilities of man. And 
the idea of a miraculous person might well seem incredible 
even to men who were credulous as to miraculous events ; 
for the events would happen without their consent, while the 
person they might have to control or resist and dispose of. 
But if anything is certain, it is that this Jesus represented 
forces vaster than these rulers could direct or command, 
arrest or annihilate. In its outer setting the Passion is as 
mean and sordid a transaction as ever passed before the eyes 
of men ; in all the outward accessories of dignity and 
grandeur it has been eclipsed thousands of times. Similar 
tragedies have been all too common. The young enthusiast, 
in revolt against the tyranny and oppression, the formalism 
and make-believe of his day, dreaming of nobler ideals for 
men and society, and attempting in some way to realize 
them, is a figure every age and every country has known. 
And if the age has not conquered the enthusiast by chang- 
ing him into the spokesman of expediency and convention, 
it has yet been able, without any dread of supernatural retri- 
bution, to bid death make an end of his power to trouble. 
And this seemed only an ordinary case of the social and 



A MEAN AND SORDID RIDDLE 323 

religious Reformer in conflict with an established order, a 
collision of the static forces which preserve a society against 
a dynamic force which threatened its disintegration. That 
force might be impersonated in a character of rare loveliness 
and potent charm, but revolution is not made agreeable 
to the men who hate it by the moral excellence of those 
who would effect it. It was enough that Jesus by word 
and action threatened the order of the temple and the 
doctrine of the synagogue ; the guardians of law and tra- 
dition could only unite to suppress a man who by question- 
ing their right to represent God and rule man, assailed 
the very foundations of society. And they acted exactly 
as men situated as they were, and believing as they did, 
were bound to act : explained the law they knew to the 
governor who did not know it in a form he was certain to 
understand ; and then demanded that he who had the power 
of life and death should exercise his power in the interests of 
the law and of the people whose sole safety it was. If their 
reading of the person of Jesus was right, one might say that 
their conduct exhibited the violence which is born of panic, 
or the craft learned by men who would, while slaves them- 
selves, govern an enslaved people as if they were free, but he 
could hardly say more. But, then, the plea which justifies 
them leaves us with a riddle which has no fellow in all 
history : How has it happened that a transaction so common 
and so unspeakably squalid should, alone of all the innumer- 
able similar occurrences in time, have been attended by con- 
sequences so extraordinary and recreative ? 

§ II. The Supernatural View of Jesus 

1. The mere necessity of asking this question is enough 
to suggest that there must have been in the person of 
Jesus elements which escaped the eye of priest and scribe 
and procurator, factors or forces of change which His death 
might strengthen but could not dissolve. And we know 



324 THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE GOSPELS 

that there were even then a few men who, for reasons they 
dimly felt rather than clearly perceived, ventured to differ 
from the scholars and statesmen who imagined that the 
duty of the world was to think their thoughts after them. 
These men were for the most part poor and ignorant 
enough, but their disadvantages were lost in one supreme 
advantage — they had known Jesus, and had learned of 
Him ; and because of this learning they were soon able, by 
what I can only describe as an extraordinary act of faith, 
to read a meaning into Him which the men of cultivated 
intelligence had failed to find. They formulated a theory 
— or, more correctly, an hypothesis — of His place and 
person, which had this remarkable peculiarity : it was an 
hypothesis which did not so much explain facts that had 
been or that were, as facts that were to be. It was what 
we may term a prophetic and a creative hypothesis, — - 
prophetic because centuries of history were to be needed, 
not to make it conceivable, yet to justify it ; creative 
because it was to call into existence the very facts that 
were to be its justification. And what was this hypo- 
thesis ? It was the idea embodied in our Gospels, common to 
all of them, though differently complexioned in each : — Jesus 
is conceived as the Messiah, sent of God, descended through 
the Jews, come to live and die for the saving of the world. 
For Him all past Jewish history had been ; towards Him 
the hopes of men and the events of history had alike con- 
verged. From Him went out the light that was to en- 
lighten — the life that was to quicken — the nations. Thus 
Mark, the oldest, the simplest, the most objective, yet the 
most picturesque of the Gospels, conceives Jesus as the 
Messiah, 1 prophesied of beforehand, 2 announced by John, 3 
declared to be the Son of God, 4 the Preacher of the king- 
dom, 5 whose Gospel is to be proclaimed to all the nations, 6 

1 i. i. 2 i. 2-3. 8 i. 7, 8. 

* i. II. 5 i. 14, 15. 8 xiii. 10; xiv. 9. 



COMMON AND PROPHETIC . 325 

the Founder of the new society who calls and instructs His 
disciples, 1 the Son of man and the Lord of the Sabbath, 2 the 
Forgiver of sins, 3 the Doer of mighty deeds, 4 who gives His 
life a ransom for many, 5 and establishes the new covenant 
in His blood. 6 Matthew, though he uses Mark, gives more 
of His words than Mark, enables us to see farther into His 
mind, and to conceive Him and His work more as He Him- 
self conceived them. But though the conception is larger, 
it is not different. He is " the Son of David, the Son of 
Abraham." 7 Yet He bears the name Immanuel, " which is, 
being interpreted, God with us." 8 The Magi worship 
Him ; 9 the devil tempts Him ; 10 the Baptist hails Him; 11 the 
disciples follow Him. 12 He fulfils the law and the prophets; 13 
His words are imperishable, they judge men ; and as He 
judges so does God. 14 He is the Son who alone knows the 
Father and only through Him can the Father be known. 15 
He is the Messianic king, whose reign is righteousness and 
peace. 16 Men who take His yoke upon them find rest to 
their souls. 17 Death ends neither His existence nor His 
authority ; He reigns for ever, and His law is to be obeyed 
every whit. 18 Luke, in what a master of style thought the 
most beautiful book in all literature, has fitly enshrined the 
most beautiful character in all history. He has a wider 
outlook than Matthew, and places Jesus, the Son of Adam,, 
which was " the Son of God," 19 in the same relation to man 
that in the first Evangelist He had held to Israel ; yet 
conceives Him as "the Son of the Most High," "the Holy 
One,'' supernaturally begotten, at whose birth the heavenly 
host sang, " Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace 

1 i. 16-20. 2 ii. 28. 8 ii. 5-1 1. 

* i. 23-28, 30, 31, 40-45 ; ii. 3-12 ; iv. 35-41 ; v. 21-43 5 vii. 24-37, 

et al. 5 x. 45. 6 xiv. 24. 7 i. 1. 

8 Matt. i. 23. 9 Mark ii. 1-12. 10 iv. 1-11. u iii. 13-15. 

12 iv. 18-22. 18 v. 17. M vii. 21-27 5 x. 32, 33. 

15 xi. 27. M vi. 33 ; x. 34-42. " xi. 30. 

18 xxviii. 18-20. 19 iii. 38. 



326 THE MIRACULOUS PERSON 

among men of good-will." 1 The author of the Fourth 
Gospel, with more speculative audacity than the synoptists, 
explained His pre-eminence thus : — " The Word which had 
ever been with God, and was God, became flesh and dwelt 
among us ; He, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom 
of the Father, hath declared Him." 2 And this incarnate 
Word, this manifested and manifesting Son, the Evangelist 
identified with Jesus. His person, in a figure which described 
a significant fact, was said to be the tabernacle or tent of 
meeting for God and man ; and they that could look within 
and bear the light saw the symbol of the invisible Presence, 
the living image which expressed the Eternal God. Jesus, 
in a word, was Deity manifested in humanity and under the 
conditions of time. 

Now this is in itself an extraordinary conception, and it 
is made more extraordinary by the marvellous way in 
which it is embodied in a personal history. There never 
was a loftier idea, or one better calculated to challenge 
prompt and -complete contradiction, than the one expressed 
in our Gospels, models though they be of simplicity in 
narrative and language. Their common purpose is to 
describe the life and record the words of a person they 
conceive as miraculous. Critics differ, and with good reason, 
as to the degree of the miraculous which the Evangelists 
severally attribute to His person. Mark does not, like John, 
speak of Him in the terms of Eternity and Deity. John and 
Mark do not, like Matthew and Luke, write of a supernatural 
conception and birth. And it may be argued, from the small 
place accorded to it and its presence in only two of our 
extant documents, that the idea of a supernatural birth 
was not held to be essential to the idea of the miraculous 
person. But what is common to all four Evangelists, and 
what is in their mind essential, is the idea not that the 
miraculous history proves the person to be supernatural, but 
1 Luke i. 32-35 ; ii. 13, 14. 2 John i. 1-2, 14, 18. 



A RATIONAL AND CONSCIOUS UNITY 327 

that the history was miraculous because it articulated and 
manifested the supernatural person. The Gospels may 
indeed be described as the interpretation of this person in 
the terms of history ; and so regarded the Jesus of Mark is 
as miraculous as the Jesus of John. There is more than 
art, there is real philosophy, in the evangelical standpoint and 
method ; for the supernatural personality is more able to 
make the supernatural in nature and history real and credible 
than the miraculous in nature and history is able to make 
the supernatural personality living and intelligible. But 
we shall be better able to understand the philosophy and 
appreciate the art when we have studied a few of the forms 
under which the person and the history are so interwoven 
as to constitute a whole whose several parts authenticate and 
illustrate each other. 

2. Jesus is conceived and represented, under whatever 
terms His Person may be described, as a conscious and 
continuous Unity. The portrait of Him is consistent, the 
work of writers who feel themselves to be dealing with a 
real and rational being, whose words could be reported and 
whose actions could be narrated in language men could 
understand. They do not write as men who romance, or 
who know that they are relating marvels other men will find 
it hard to believe : on the contrary they write soberly, with 
the unperplexed consciousness of men who describe matters 
of fact which, though wonderful, are yet entirely credible, 
because in keeping with the person and attributes of Him 
whose acts they are said to be. There is nothing so difficult 
as to unite in a single person attributes which experience 
has never seen so associated, and which thought persists 
in conceiving as opposites ; but what would be not so much 
difficult as impossible would be for a writer to betray no 
consciousness of invention, no feeling of the abnormal ; and 
to maintain, alike as regards nature, character, and action, 
the integrity and concrete unity of his hero as a rational 



328 JESUS NO MYTHICAL CREATION 

and historical being. Yet these are the features which 
distinguish our canonical Gospels. The Evangelists, how- 
ever simple, uncritical, and credulous we may conceive 
them to have been, yet knew the distinction between the 
ordinary and the extraordinary, the normal and the miracu- 
lous ; and understood how little compatible miracles were 
with the persons of the men they met in daily life. Experi- 
ence, therefore, could not supply them with any type to 
which they could conform the person they meant to portray. 
Two alternatives are thus alone possible : either the portrait 
was ideal, a product of the creative imagination, or real, a 
study from life, a picture which embodied personal experi- 
ence and observation. 

One of the forms under which the theory of an ideal 
portrait may be presented has already been noticed. 1 It is 
an unconscious creation of the mythical imagination, regret- 
ful and retrospective. The theory is eminently attractive : 
it saves the honesty of the writers, it does justice to their 
affections, it credits them with minute knowledge of Hebrew 
literature, it endows them with an instructed imagination, 
which it quickens by admiration and inspires by love. But 
one thing it fails to do : explain how a selective fancy could, 
out of so many borrowed and broken and unjointed frag- 
ments, weave so perfect a personal unity and place it in an 
historical environment so suitable and consistent. The ideal 
remains an ideal, do with it what we will. The more sponta- 
neously and without design the imagination works, the less 
will it be under the control of the critical reason, and there- 
fore the more independent of local colouring and conditions ; 
and so will be the less heedful of any violent improbabilities 
in the prosaic matters of time and space. But these are the 
very matters in which the evangelical histories are so real, so 
natural, and so exact. They are full of the feeling for the 
time ; they understand its men, schools, classes, parties ; they 
1 Ante, pp. 10-12. 



BUT A STUDY FROM LIFE 329 

know the thoughts that are in the air, the rumours that run 
along the street ; they are familiar with the catchwords and 
phrases of the period, its conventions, questions, modes of 
discussion, and style of argument. And all is presented with 
the utmost realism, so grouped round the central figure as 
to form a perfect historical picture, He and His setting being 
so built together as to constitute a single organic whole. 
Now this appears a feat which the mythical imagination, 
working with material derived from the Old Testament, 
could not have performed. It could not have made its hero 
mythical without making the conditions under which He lived 
and the persons with whom He lived the same. The realism 
of these conditions and persons is incompatible with the 
mythical idealism of Him through whom they are, and whose 
environment they constitute. The organic unity of person 
and history seems to involve the reality of both. 

It appears, then, as if the legitimate inference from the 
histories themselves were that we have in Jesus a study 
from life — the portrait of one who actually lived and as He 
lived. And it is this which gives peculiar value to the 
fact that the authors of the Gospels use to describe their 
subject two distinct classes of terms, expressing ideas that 
must have been as opposite to them as they are to us, 
which we differentiate, though they did not, as " natural " and 
" supernatural." He appears in all four Gospels as the son of 
Mary, as known to the inhabitants of Nazareth, where he had 
been brought up, though all they tell us is that He was a 
citizen of that mean city, and a member of one of its 
humblest families. He is described as growing in stature, in 
wisdom, and in favour with God and man. The one glimpse 
we have into His boyhood shows Him as a child His parents 
could lose and seek sorrowing ; and in His manhood and 
public ministry He is seen to share our common human weak- 
nesses. He is represented as weary, as hungry, as thirsty, as 
angry, as suffering, as in need of sympathy, as seeking God 



330 NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL IN UNION 

in prayer, as shrinking from death, as dying, and as dead. 
The attributes and the fate of universal man are His as they 
are ours. But He also appears, as we have just seen, clothed 
in quite other attributes and doing quite extraordinary things. 
He is to all four Evangelists the Son of God, the Messiah, 
Lord of the Sabbath, and Saviour of men, with power on 
earth to forgive sins, to establish the kingdom of God, to 
found a new covenant in His blood, and to judge the people, 
acquitting or condemning them as they have or have not 
confessed Him. And He behaves as one to whom such acts 
and attributes can be ascribed. He calls disciples, and 
forms them into an eternal and universal society. He works 
miracles, heals the diseased, casts out devils, feeds the 
hungry, even raises the dead. He has miracles worked upon 
Him, is transfigured and appears in a visible glory which 
proclaims Him the Son of God, and, after suffering the death 
of the Cross and being laid in the grave, He is raised up 
and appears unto many. 

Now the remarkable thing is not simply that these attri- 
butes and acts are represented as His, but that they are 
conceived as quite natural to Him, as not making Him 
anomalous or abnormal, but as leaving Him simple and 
rational and real, — a person who never ceases to be Himself, 
who has no double consciousness and plays no double part, 
but expresses Himself in history according to the nature 
He has and the truth within Him. There is nothing quite 
like this in literature, no miraculous person who is so truly 
natural, so continuously one and the same ; and no writers of 
the miraculous who so feel that they are dealing with what is 
normal and regular through and through. These are things 
which have more than a psychological interest ; they speak 
of men who have stood face to face with the reality, and 
are conscious of only describing what they saw. 



CHAPTER II 

THE HISTORICAL PERSON AND HIS PHYSICAL 
TRANSCENDENCE 

THE art with which the Evangelists interweave into a 
congruous whole the person and the acts of Jesus is 
so perfect as to deserve detailed examination ; and it is the 
more remarkable as it seems unconscious art, accomplished 
by men who know not what they do. They conceive Him to 
be supernatural, and they attribute to Him miraculous acts, 
yet with an undesigned discrimination more sure than the 
most highly educated sense they observe distinctions and 
limits which leave Him the most natural of beings, and cause 
His most extraordinary actions to appear normal. It has 
been customary to discuss the miracles of Jesus as questions 
now in philosophy, whether they are possible ; now in 
historical criticism, whether they are credible ; and now in 
literary interpretation, whether they can be resolved into 
myths or allegories, the records of misunderstood events or 
of marvellous coincidences, or must be construed as authentic 
narratives. But the problems they raise are religious and 
ethical as well as philosophical and historical, and, we may 
add, the former are profounder and more determinative than 
the latter. Here we shall be concerned with the acts as an 
undesigned exegesis of the person, the two being so related 
as to be complementary and mutually explanatory ; in other 
words, the acts when construed through the person become 
intelligible, while the person interpreted through the acts 
grows more articulate and coherent, conformed in being to 
His place in history. 



332 ACTS AND CHARACTER CORRESPOND 



§ I. A Sane Supernaturalism 

I. What we have to study, then, is the representation of a 
supernatural person in an historical framework ; i.e. we have 
to study, in a literary medium which is amenable to the fixed 
canons of criticism, a Being who transcends nature even while 
He lives under the forms and subject to the conditions of the 
nature He transcends. Now, the first thing we have here 
to note is this : — The miraculous acts which are ascribed to 
Jesus have qualities which curiously correspond to His char- 
acter, or, in other words, they so duplicate and reflect it that 
the moral attributes which are most distinctive of Him re- 
appear in His acts. Where they seem most supernatural 
they most completely externalize His nature. The common 
quality which distinguishes them all may be described as 
sanity or sobriety. Those acts which we term miraculous are 
yet not marvellous ; they do not move in the region of the 
weird or the uncanny, nor do they, like the feats of the witch, 
strike with fear, or, like the tricks of the wizard or magician, 
smite with surprise. There is nothing so alien to the feeling 
of the Gospels as the love of wonders for wonders' sake. 
This is the more remarkable as the religious imagination, 
when allowed to work freely in the region of the supernatural, 
does not work sanely. The mythical miracle, as a rule, 
reflects a morbid temper, for it is commonly the creation of a 
fancy grown fantastic and even childish. As genius is closely 
allied to madness, so there are types of piety near akin to 
disease. The temper is permanent, but the forms it loves 
vary from age to age, though they all have a common 
character. The morbid temper, in our age and country, 
has no temptation to dream of miracles, but it may dream 
of things quite as mythical and unreal. In Liddon's Life of 
the late Dr. Pusey, a book marked by rare truth and candour, 
there is a very painful yet illuminative chapter dealing with 






THE MYTHICAL IMAGINATION UNHEALTHY 333 

his personal attitude to " penitence and confession." 1 It in- 
troduces us to the innermost, and in some aspects the most 
secret, chamber of his soul, where understanding is difficult 
and misjudgment easy. There is nothing that so reveals the 
moral quality of a man as his sense of sin, and nothing that 
even his bosom friend can so little comprehend and share. 
It is a sense so commanding that it will not be reasoned with, 
and must be appeased before the man can know peace. But 
it is a thing infinitely varied in form, and it is the form it 
assumes which shows the intrinsic character of the man. Now 
the sense of sin in Pusey was more sensuous than spiritual, 
more a matter for himself to bear than for grace to remove. It 
harassed him more than the sense of God comforted him, and 
so he felt as one who must express his conscious desert of ill in 
pains and penances. Hence it was as " an unnamed penitent " 
that he built a church at Leeds. His suspension in 1843, his 
wife's death and his daughter's, his public anxieties and private 
sorrows, he regarded as "punishments for his sins." He im- 
plored Keble to act as his father confessor, and he confessed 
himself " scarred all over and seamed with sin," " a monster " 
to himself; he loathed himself; he felt as if he were " covered 
with leprosy from head to foot." He begged for " a rule of 
penitential discipline " ; he wore " haircloth " next his skin ; 
he scourged himself ; he resolved to " use a hard seat by day 
and a hard bed by night " ; " not to wear gloves or protect his 
hands " ; " never to notice anything unpleasant in what was 
set on the table, but to take it by preference and in a peniten- 
tial spirit " ; " to drink cold water at dinner, as only fit to be 
where there is not a drop to cool this flame " ; " never to look 
at beauty of nature without inward confession of unworthi- 
ness." Now to lay on these sayings, heavy as they are with 
the passion of unspeakable grief, a cold and analytic hand 
would be both cruel and profane ; but what they illustrate is 
the morbid as distinguished from the moral in the sense of 
1 Vol. iii. chap. iv. pp. 94-1 n. 



334 THE MODERATION OF THE GOSPELS 

sin, i.e. the feeling that it is something that can be satisfied by 
physical penance, and not solely by the infinite grace of God. 
But where this morbid sense is, a sane imagination is sure to 
be afar off ; the view of self supplies the colour under which 
we see the universe, and to an imagination so possessed 
strange dreams and unwholesome fancies easily become sub- 
stantial things. In a credulous age it creates miraculous 
marvels, as easily as it creates in a rational and sceptical age 
forms of penance. 

This morbid consciousness, then, is the real mythical 
faculty, and the miracles it generates are even as it is. In 
certain men and times it becomes the veritable master of 
the mind. The more ethical the religious imagination is, it 
is the more sane ; but in the very degree that it is sensuous 
it is fantastic, and is certain to people history with creations 
which mirror and echo its own hopes and fears. We have 
only to turn to ecclesiastical history to find examples innumer- 
able of the miracles the mythical faculty invents, unconsciously, 
of course, though all the more in obedience to its own laws. 
Thus, if we compare with the Gospels Jerome's Life of 
Hilarion or the Four Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the 
difference between sobriety and extravagance in narratives 
concerning the miraculous will soon become evident. The 
one is the most learned of all the Fathers, the other is the 
most sagacious of the early Popes ; and so far as the culture 
that comes of letters and affairs, or knowledge and experi- 
ence, are concerned, they are both incomparably superior to 
the Evangelists. Well, then, Jerome gravely narrates such 
things as these : how Hilarion by his prayers made a barren 
woman to bear ; how a certain Italicus, whose horses raced in 
the circus, prayed the saint to give him, since he was a Christ- 
ian, a victory over his heathen rival, and how, by water out 
of the cup from which he used to drink, the horses of Italicus 
were made to flee to the goal, while those of his competitor 
stuck fast to the spot ; how the saint casts out a lascivious devil 



EXTRAVAGANCE OF JEROME AND GREGORY 335 

from a maid who had been bewitched by certain magic figures 
and formulas buried beneath" the threshold of her house ; 
how he dispossessed of another devil a gigantic camel, which 
thirty men with strong ropes could hardly hold ; how he com- 
manded a mighty serpent, which had been devouring oxen, to 
ascend a pyre and be burned to ashes before all the people ; 
how, months after his death, his body was conveyed from 
Cyprus to Palestine as perfect as if alive, and fragrant with 
sweet odours ; and how at the places alike where he had been 
and where he was buried great miracles were daily performed, 
in the one case as it were by his body, in the other by his 
spirit. Gregory's miracles are even more marvellous than 
those described by Jerome, for he tells how certain of his 
Italian fathers or monks could treat the water as if it had 
been solid land ; how pieces of gold, fresh as from the mint, 
fell upon them from heaven ; how floods which rose even to 
the roofs of churches did not enter in at the doors, though 
they stood open ; how the arm of an executioner, uplifted to 
strike off a monk's head, remained erect and fixed, sword and 
all, in the air, but power over it was restored on the promise 
being made never again to use it against a Christian. And as 
here, so always ; for the creations of the mythical faculty are 
everywhere curiously akin. The mediaeval friar would tell 
his hearers how a robber, who had been always devout and 
regular in his prayers to the Virgin, was at length taken and 
sentenced to be hanged ; but when the cord was round his 
neck he prayed to his heavenly patroness, and she, with her 
own white hands, held him up two whole days, and so saved 
him from death : or how a paper of Scriptural proofs which 
the good St. Dominic had written to confound his opponents, 
leaped out of the fire into which it had been cast, while their 
documents remained and were utterly consumed. The Bud- 
dhist monk, illustrating the benevolence of the Master, would 
tell how in an earlier mode of existence he had met a famished 
tiger, and, pitying the hungry beast, had kindly offered him- 



336 JESUS AN EMBODIED BENEFICENCE 

self as a meal ; or how, regretting that his people had no fit 
image of himself, he appeared as a poor workman, carved the 
image, and vanished from the sight of those who would have 
rewarded him. The mythical faculty speaks in all the lan- 
guages of man, but the thing itself we can never mistake for 
reality : its very features show whence it has come. 

2. If now we compare the miracles of the Gospels with 
these, we shall understand what is meant by their sanity or 
sobriety. They have a sort of natural character, and are. 
neither violent nor abnormal ; like Jesus Himself, they are, 
though supernatural, not contra-natural. For what are the 
miraculous acts ascribed to Him? He heals the blind, the 
halt, the lame, the sick of the palsy ; He brings comfort to 
the widow who has lost a son, to the Gentile nobleman who 
mourns a child ; He creates joy in the heart of the woman 
who had sought counsel of many physicians and only grew 
the worse for all their attempts at healing. He goes through 
life like a kind of embodied beneficence, creating health and 
happiness. He incorporates the energies that work against 
physical evil and for social good. In a sense, His miracles 
are but the transcripts of His character, the symbol of His 
mind and mission. Were we to imagine an incorporated 
grace or mercy, should we not conceive her path marked by 
similar deeds ? These miracles are, in a word, the physical 
counterparts of Christ's moral character and ethical teachings. 
Without them our picture of His personality would be incom- 
plete. They show Him as the enemy of disease, of bodily 
imperfection and suffering, as a factor of the outer conditions 
that make for happiness. Without them our image of Him 
would be incomplete, while their singular freedom from the 
qualities everywhere characteristic of the mythical miracle 
place them in a category by themselves. One thing is 
certain : they could not have owed their freedom from these 
customary mythical adornments to the Evangelists them- 
selves. For they were men who stood alike as regards age, 



INTELLECTUAL SANITY OF EVANGELISTS 337 

culture, and country, exactly at the stage when we expect 
the mythical consciousness to be creative ; their material 
may have come to them in forms and under conditions 
favourable to its exercise, but yet the miracles they describe 
have this altogether exceptional character of moral sanity 
and rational sobriety. It were indeed the simple truth 
to say that the Evangelists are the most modern writers 
of Christian antiquity ; and we may add, without fear of 
contradiction, that with the most absolute and august idea 
of the supernatural to be found in the whole literature of 
religion, they have given it an expression so objective and 
realistic as to be without any parallel. If we compare them 
with Fathers like Tertullian writing on the " Spectacles," or 
describing the nature and ways of wicked spirits ; or with 
works like those of Athanasius on Antony ; or Gregory of 
Nyssa on his namesake of Neo-Caesarea ; or with Augustine 
telling miracles he himself had witnessed ; or Sulpicius naively 
narrating those worked by Martin of Tours, we shall come to 
the conclusion that our Gospels are remarkable, above all other 
ancient Christian histories, for critical caution and intellectual 
sanity. Is it too bold an inference to argue that the very 
magnitude of their subject had susperseded in the Evangelists 
the creative activity of the morbid and mythical imagination ? 

§ II. The Physical Transcendence is Moral Obedience 

I. But a still more distinctive quality of the supernatural 
action ascribed to Jesus is its altruistic character. His miracles 
do not regard Himself. This quality is all the more significant 
that the Evangelists themselves seem hardly conscious of its 
existence. It is implicit in their narratives rather than ex- 
plicit in their thought ; but, while unexplicated, it is a most 
integral element of their history. Thus it comes out quite 
distinctly in the Temptation, which, we may assume, repre- 
sents a series of events whose importance lies in their being 

p.c.r. 22 



338 THE TEMPTATION A SUBJECTIVE PROCESS 

the symbols of a subjective process. It stands at the thres- 
hold of the ministry, i.e. just when the consciousness of His 
mission had become clear and imperative to Jesus ; and it 
describes the crisis as more moral than intellectual, or as 
due to His struggle with conflicting ideals. The greater the 
mission the more certain it is to present alternative policies 
expressing incommensurable principles ; and what is tempta- 
tion but the struggle of the conscience in favour of the more 
ethical and against the more expedient policy ? 

If we assume, then, that what is so named represents a 
real experience, a transaction within the soul of Jesus, what 
would be its natural sources or factors ? 

(a) There would be the question of His place in nature, 
His power over it, its power over Him, especially as affecting 
His relation to men and the work He had to do on their 
behalf. This is the point which is emphasized in the first 
temptation : " make these stones bread." * If this be read in 
the light of His later history, what does it mean ? Simply 
this : ' Do for yourself what you know that you have power 
to do for others ; the energies with which you are entrusted 
will be best disciplined for the service of all by being first 
exercised in your own. What it is right to do for those 
who need redemption, it cannot be wrong to do for their 
Redeemer. You are to feed the hungry ; begin by feeding 
yourself. Your own physical fitness for the work you are 
intended to do ought surely to be a primary care.' 

Now why should this suggestion have appeared as a temp- 
tation? Does it not rather seem like the recognition of a 
fact ; to wit, the pre-eminence which endowed Jesus with 
special means for the preservation of life, particularly His 
own ? We may assume, in accordance with all human 
experience, that the potentialities in Him and the possibilities 
latent in His career would make their appeal to His imagina- 

1 Matt. iv. 3 ; Luke iv. 3. The order in which the temptations are 
taken is Matthew's, not Luke's. 



ITS ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE 339 

tion first in a purely personal form. But here the appeal is 
shown to have been made only to be dismissed as if it were 
a suggestion of the devil. " Man," Jesus says, " does not 
live by bread alone." That is, He recoils from the temptation 
to affirm the pre-eminence of His person by supernatural 
energy expended on Himself; for if He had performed such 
an act on His own behalf, it would have signified that He 
took Himself out of the category of manhood ; that He 
surrendered the act of sacrifice ; and it would have declared 
that His function was not to practise obedience, but to 
exercise personal power. In other words, He would have 
removed Himself from the ranks of the created who live under 
nature, and through it depend upon the Creator ; and He 
would have relegated Himself to a special dignity where 
physical law ceased to reign, i.e. He would have translated 
His work into the assertion rather than the sacrifice of Him- 
self. He would also have separated Himself from man, have 
ceased to be like unto His brethren, have refused to share the 
common lot, and instead have preferred the solitary state of a 
being beyond and above it. But it would have affected His 
relation to God even more than His relation to man ; for 
He would, by ceasing to be dependent upon Him, have 
become, in a sense, God to Himself, and so the precise con- 
trary of man in his dependence upon God. The very root 
out of which religion grows would thus have been eradicated 
in Him ; and He would have fallen from His high estate as 
the normal type of the soul's relation to God, and of God's 
to the soul. 

(/3) If, then, " man liveth not by bread alone, but by the 
word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God," it follows 
that not otherwise than by this word did it become the Son 
of man to live. The first temptation thus represents the 
conflict of the ideal of dependence with the ideal of pre- 
eminence, or the law of an ordinary with the privileges 
of an extraordinary manhood. The second stands for an 



340 AS MAN DEPENDENT ON GOD 

exactly opposite conflict — that of a reasonable against a blind 
dependence. " Cast Thyself down," it says, " from this pin- 
nacle of the temple ; for it is written, ' He shall give His 
angels charge concerning Thee : and on their hands shall 
they bear Thee up, lest haply Thou dash Thy foot against a 
stone.' " * This may be said to express the sense of depend- 
ence turned into sheer presumption, challenging God to 
exercise sole care for His Son, and to make immediate inter- 
vention in His interest. It is as if the tempter had said : " If 
You will renounce all power for personal ends, and refuse to 
act as Your own Providence ; if You have resolved to live as 
one who knows Himself to be always and everywhere in the 
hands of the Almighty, — then prove Your august eminency 
and the sufficiency of Your faith by throwing Yourself from 
this height into the court below, so forcing God to intervene 
directly on Your behalf. By so doing You will dispose men 
to expect great things of You, and to repose great trust in 
you. And I will add, that only such absolute trust is worthy 
of the Son of God ; and only by such absolute Providence 
would the Father be fitly declared." 

The ideal is thus a confidence in God so absolute as to 
have become contempt of nature. But what is the answer of 
Jesus to this second suggestion ? " Thou shalt not tempt the 
Lord thy God." And what did this answer mean? Simply 
this — that if He had dealt with Himself as if He were an 
exceptional and pre-eminent object of divine care, two things 
would have followed : first, His complete isolation from man, 
who holds his being under physical as well as moral law, 
and is bound at every moment and in all things to deal with 
the physical as if it were the moral ; and, secondly, He would 
have substituted for a life environed by nature, guarded, 
guided, fed by it, participant in its forces because subject 
to its laws, a life divorced from nature, hostile to it, finding 
in it no presence of God, realizing through it no fellowship 
1 Matt iv. 5-7 ; Luke iv. 9-12. 



ETHICAL IN MEANS AS IN END 341 

with man, inheriting nothing from its past, bequeathing 
nothing to its future. The temptation thus, under the dis- 
guise of honour to God, aimed at alienation alike from Him 
and from the fellowship of man. 

(7) The third temptation is a subtle combination of elements 
derived from the other two. 1 It means that He may by 
the use of physical and unethical forces obtain the mastery 
over the kingdoms of the world. In other words, it signifies 
that a person who has pre-eminent power ought to exercise 
the power he has without regard to God, or to the rights and 
the souls of men. And if God be regarded, it ought to be 
only so far as He may be a factor, more or less efficient, 
for some personal end ; or, if man be helped, it will not 
matter though his soul be soiled, his conscience perverted, 
and his will enfeebled and depraved in the process. The 
ideal that stands opposed to this affirms that God is the 
only being man ought to worship ; and that He can be 
worshipped only in a spirit and way that at once glorifies 
Him and exalts man. 

If, then, the experience so picturesquely presented in the 
temptation has been correctly read, we may express its 
meaning thus : — The supernatural potencies which move 
within Jesus leave Him neither an extra- nor a contra- nor 
a praeter-natural person, but a person to Himself and for 
Himself strictly and surely natural, with powers which are 
to be understood and used as means to ethical and altruistic 
ends, to increase the duty of obedience, to limit rather than 
enlarge the sphere of man's independence of God. 

2. But the Temptation is so significant because it is the 
pictorial embodiment of ideas which rise spontaneously in 
the mind whenever man thinks of one possessed of super- 
natural power. They are ideas which Jesus Himself must 
have conceived, if not entertained ; and as a matter of fact, 
they are the very ideas which prompted questions He was 
1 Matt. iv. 8-10 ; Luke iv. 5-8. 



342 TEMPTATION CONTINUOUS AND SIGNIFIES 

required to answer, criticisms He had to bear, and even the 
mockery and bitter taunts which insulted Him on the cross. 
Thus " Let Him save Himself, if this is the Christ of God, 
His chosen," 1 is just a variation of the tempter's words, " If 
Thou art the Son of God, command that these stones be- 
come bread." Again, " He trusteth in God, let Him deliver 
Him now if He desireth Him," 2 simply repeats "If Thou 
art the Son of God, cast Thyself down." " Let the Christ, 
the King of Israel, now come down from the cross that we 
may see and believe," 3 is only a changed reading of the 
temptation that promised Him the world's dominion if He 
would use the world's power. This priestly and popular 
scorn, then, may express the selfishness of a nature which has 
forsaken and forgotten God, but it does not at all represent 
Christ's mind or will. It was man explaining Jesus by 
himself, showing by a process of unconscious imputation 
what he himself would be and do were it only granted to 
him to be the Christ. 

In His whole life, then, and in all His actions Jesus 
exercised His power always and only for man. The 
mystery of the life which so appealed to the heart and 
imagination of His people lies here — with the power to 
save He yet wills to lose Himself. The vision of God 
which He creates brings to man beatitude ; the vision of 
sin which He suffers brings to Himself sorrow. The strength 
of His will is seen not in any immunity from calamity 
which He commands, but in the sacrifice He makes. And 
this touches a specific and distinctive quality of the super- 
natural element in the Gospels. There is nothing like it 
in the mythology of the miraculous. The mythical miracle 
is primarily personal ; for what could be the use of a super- 
natural power which did not serve its possessor in his own 
hour of need ? Among the founders of great religions no life 

1 Luke xxiii. 35. 2 Matt, xxvii. 43. 

3 Mark xv. 32 ; Matt, xxvii. 42. 



THAT JESUS IS MEASURED BY MAN 343 

is freer from mythical wonders than Mohammed's ; but when 
they appear, it is in his interest. Thus we are told that the 
Prophet, when fleeing from Mecca, was hotly pursued by his 
foes. He took refuge in a cave, but as soon as he had 
entered it God sent a spider, which wove its web over the 
cave's mouth. His pursuers, who were close behind, stopped, 
intending to enter ; but when they saw the spider's web, they 
said, " He cannot have entered here, for this great web could 
not have been so quickly woven " ; and so they rode on, 
leaving the Prophet to escape out of their hands. The tale 
has in the myths of all religions many fellows ; for it is 
Nature herself which bids men think that he who has been 
endowed with extraordinary power will exercise it first on 
his own behalf, and only as a secondary purpose on behalf of 
man. But Jesus from first to last, in all His acts and in all 
His doings, is supernatural on man's behalf and not on His 
own. He was a moral wonder rather than a physical marvel. 

§ III. Supernatural Power as a Moral Burden 

But there is a third aspect under which the super- 
natural power which the Evangelists ascribed to Jesus must 
be viewed, viz., in its bearing on His own moral character and 
on His moral relations with men. 

I. If we consider it under the first aspect, we shall see 
that there could be no more tremendous gift ; for it would 
be, under the ordinary laws that govern human nature, a 
power working for immorality. Under the most favourable 
conditions it would tax self-control to a degree that no 
moral will known to us could bear. To measure its strength, 
we may compare it with forces that lie within our own 
experience or that have acted upon the stage of history. 

The power which men may not challenge and cannot re- 
sist tends always to deprave and even brutalize its possessor. 
Without the criticism of men, man would have to suffer from 
the unqualified action of mischievous moral influences. The 



344 ABSOLUTE POWER DEPRAVES MAN 

man who feels above the law for himself, while he is the 
source of the law which distributes life and death to other 
men, has in his own passions and ambitions tempters which 
beguile him into forgetfulness of all the fair humanities. 
Flatterers surround him, and where man never has the truth 
spoken to him. by men he easily comes to act like a devil, 
for he feels so like a god. To be able to command and to 
compel obedience to his commandments while under no 
compulsion to obey them himself, is an attitude ruinous to 
a nature which was designed to be made perfect through 
obedience, and to learn it through feeling dependent. Neigh- 
bourliness, fellowship, is needful to humanity ; and if by 
undue elevation or depression we are denied it, we are certain 
to suffer moral disaster. And so social extremes meet ; the 
worst crimes are to be found among those who are either at 
the very top or at the very bottom of society. It is a grave 
and a terrible fact that in the long catalogue of Roman 
emperors we have only one Marcus Antoninus, and even he, 
though a saint, was not tolerant of saintliness ; but we have a 
multitude who do more disgrace than honour to mankind — 
men like Tiberius and Caligula, like Nero or Domitian. 
Roman order might be a great thing for the Roman popula- 
tion ; but it too often involved the moral sacrifice of the men 
who were its nominal guardians. The imperial family which 
stands in Europe for the purest form of autocratic power, 
shows also the most dismal examples of moral madness. 
The house of Romanoff has, above all other sovereign houses, 
been stained by the uncleanliest vices, — crimes explicable only 
through the insanity which seizes those who may command 
others, but who go uncommanded themselves. The most 
pitiful victim of despotism is the despot ; for while his power 
may, like a glacier, grind and pulverize the rock in which he 
makes his bed and through which he forces his way, yet 
he himself is like the deadly ice which can never know the 
presence of kindly and beautiful life. 



UNLESS HE BE AS GOOD AS GOD 345 

But now let us apply the principle which we have thus 
derived from experience and history to a person who is 
believed to possess supernatural power, and who believes 
himself to possess it. Such power would be a more 
dangerous possession, a heavier burden for self-restraint to 
bear, a vaster force for wisdom to direct, than would the 
most absolute political autocracy. The character of the 
man who had it would be more severely tried than were 
he penetrated by transmitted passions or enervated by 
acquired lusts. For were he a being of fine nature, would 
he not, when confronted by the infinite meanness of men, 
their duplicity, their insensibility to the higher ideals, 
their avarice, their selfish greed, be ever, under the pro- 
vocation of a noble rage, tempted to execute upon them 
the swiftest vengeance? If he saw oppression victorious 
and freedom lying wounded and broken under its hoof, or 
if he heard lust vaunting the chastity it had violated and 
falsehood triumphing over the truth it had betrayed, how 
could he resist the impulse which bade him become the sword 
of God ? But what is the justice that proceeds from impulse 
save a form of self-indulgence ? And does not a moral in- 
dignation which is ever indulged, easily become a vengeance 
that will not be satiated ? Such a power would therefore 
inevitably tend to disturb the balance or sobriety of the 
moral nature ; and unless he who possessed it had a will so 
absolutely under moral control as to be proof against the 
tides and tempests of moral passion, he would soon become 
the victim of the thousand immoral forces that act upon 
spirit through sense. We may say, then, that only a being 
absolutely God-like in his goodness could be equal to the 
control of so awful and so tremendous a power. 

Were, then, any being less than infinite in wisdom, right- 
eousness, and grace to be invested with omnipotence, his 
might would soon overmaster his morality and turn him into 
the most unspeakable of devils. For what would ungoverned 



346 POWER DOES NOT DEPRAVE JESUS 

power in command of the universe be but Satan upon the 
throne of the Almighty ? And were he, though only for a 
moment, to sit there, the devil transformed into an omni- 
potent god, would he not undo the work of eternity and 
reduce the universe to a chaos which would be a universe 
no more ? Omnipotence without divine goodness would 
become a force working simply for destruction. The oppor- 
tunity to use a might none can question needs for its control 
a goodness none can doubt. And what have we in the 
Gospels ? The picture of a will uncorrupted by power, 
untempted by opportunity, beneficent in the exercise of the 
mysterious energy with which it was charged. Jesus lives 
His open and frank and natural life as simply as the child 
who takes no thought for to-morrow because he is in the 
hands of one who thinks for him. And so He dwells in 
our imagination as obedient, humble, gentle, and easily 
entreated, never as the Master of the mysterious forces which 
rule nature. 

2. But now the second aspect of the matter — its effect 
upon His moral relations with men — must also be considered. 
How would men be affected by seeing a man possessed of 
what they thought supernatural power ? We know how 
terrible a thing witchcraft seemed in the days when people 
believed in its existence. The witch was a person to whom 
men showed no mercy ; their fear became a frenzy which no- 
thing less than death by fire or water could appease. And 
we need not wonder at their conduct, for if we believed as 
our forefathers believed, we should act as they did, possibly 
with even blinder fury. For to feel that a given person has 
over nature a power we wot not of, and can bid it torment 
or insidiously kill an enemy, undermine the health of the 
strong or work vindictively against the innocent, is to feel in 
the presence of one whom common justice cannot deal with, 
for common laws do not control ; and, therefore, of one who 
must be driven forth from life, if life is to be lived in peace. 



OR ALIENATE MAN FROM HIM 347 

Wherever there has been belief in the ability to exercise 
supernatural power, this has been the universal feeling ; and 
if it has been tempered at all, it has been by the hope of 
bribing the mysterious person to use his power for the 
briber's ends rather than his own. 

The only complete exception to this law of human nature 
is the one which appears in the Gospels. The recognition 
of Christ's miraculous will is universal. All the men who 
surround Him believe that He possesses it ; they see Him 
exercise it ; they crave, though they never attempt to bribe 
Him, that He exercise it on their behalf. But here there is 
an unconscious contrast between the Master and the disciples, 
who, as the incident of Simon the magian shows, could be 
regarded as men that might be bribed. 1 Yet the miracle 
is a more integral part of the evangelical than of the 
apostolical history. The messengers from John are bidden 
by Jesus to " tell the things which they do see and hear : 
the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers 
are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and 
the poor have the gospel preached to them." 2 The cen- 
turion asks that his servant may be healed, 3 the sick of the 
palsy are brought to Him as He sits surrounded by His very 
enemies. 4 These enemies question His right to forgive sins, 
but not His power to heal diseases. They have indeed a 
theory as to the sources of His power — He does it by 
Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. 5 But is not this the 
most remarkable tribute they could pay to His self-control ? 
Would they have ventured to attribute to the devil in Him 
the power which they acknowledged that He possessed, if 
they had thought that His will was really devilish ? Would 
they not have spoken softly, and called Him by the gentlest 
names they knew, if they had believed that He incarnated 

1 Acts viii. 18, 19. 2 Matt. xi. 4, 5. 

3 Luke vii. 1-10 ; cf. John iv. 46-54 ; Mark v. 22-24, 3S _ 43- 

4 Mark ii. 6-12. 5 Mark iii. 22-30. 



348 MORAL GREATNESS ABOVE MIRACLES 

malevolence rather than benevolence ? And this quality is 
illustrated no less by those who believe in the beneficence of 
His supernatural will. They do not feel that it divides Him 
from them ; they never distrust Him or suspect His motives, 
or feel that the extraordinary power which He possesses will 
be used for any other than a gracious purpose. 

It is thus remarkable that the terror which ordinarily 
follows belief in demoniac power is, even when He is 
maliciously credited with it, here entirely absent. Men think 
Him so possessed by a moral will that they do not feel 
fear in a presence they believe to be supernatural. He is 
even to His enemies, more marvellous for the grace He 
impersonates than for the miracles He accomplishes. And 
this is simply saying that He was higher as a moral miracle 
than as a physical power. While the power may be great, 
the grace is greater, and men peacefully trust where under 
other circumstances they would have profoundly feared. 
This is a feature in the evangelical narratives that marks 
them with distinction. The character which they portray 
is so morally perfect that supernatural power can neither 
deprave it nor alienate men from Him who possesses it. 

§ IV. The History of the Supernatural Person as a Problem 

in Literature 

I. But there is a literary question which deserves to be 
looked at : the Gospels are histories which aim at perform- 
ing a most daring feat ; they bind together a person conceived 
to be supernatural and the actual world, and they describe 
the life He lived within it. This involved literary difficulties 
of two kinds : (a) theological — How were the extraordinary 
nature and relations attributed to Jesus to affect their theistic 
idea ? and (J?) historical — In what sort of history was this 
nature and these relations to be unfolded ? 

(a) The Evangelists cannot be charged with possessing a 



THE SUPERNATURAL PERSON AND DEITY 349 

mean theistic idea. They inherited an august conception of 
Deity, the least anthropomorphic, the most untouched by 
human passion, weakness, or mutability, known to antiquity ; 
and to represent this God as the Father of Jesus without 
degrading or undeifying Him, was a literary task of the 
rarest delicacy and difficulty. In the mythical age of 
Greece it had been easy to imagine men as the sons of 
Zeus, and Zeus as the father of gods and men ; but the 
more the mythical age receded the more its crude images 
and grotesque dogmas grew distasteful to the Greek in- 
telligence, which refined Deity by making Him too abstract 
to stand in real or concrete relations with men. And what 
philosophy had done for Greece the monotheistic passion 
did for Israel ; with the result that the more Jehovah was 
exalted the greater became His distance from man, and the 
less could the sons of God be conceived as mixing with the 
daughters of men. The sublimest things are the most easily 
made ridiculous, the most sacred can be most utterly pro- 
faned. And if any one had been asked beforehand to de- 
scribe the probable action of the idea of Jesus as Son of the 
Most High on the idea of God, would he not have drawn a 
dismal picture of Majesty lowered into the dust, spirituality 
coarsened and materialized, and reason humbled by being 
carried back into that twilight of intelligence when as yet 
gods were indistinguishable from men? But the result is 
exactly the opposite. The supernatural birth is touched with 
a most delicate hand, and has no essential feature in common 
with the mythical theogonies which earlier ages had known. 
The marvellous thing is not that we have two birth stories, 
but that we have only two ; and that they occupy so small, 
so incidental, so almost negligible a place in the New Testa- 
ment as a whole. What is still more extraordinary is the 
mode in which the Sonship of Jesus affects the conception 
of God, how it touches its majesty with grace, softens its 
rigour, turns its solitude into society, and changes it from a 



350THE SUPERNATURAL PERSON AS HISTORICAL 

dead abstract into a living concrete. The Fatherhood, which 
is its correlate, made the God of the Jews into the God of 
the whole earth. The Evangelists so present Jesus that He 
appears as a Son so intensely individual as to impart a per- 
sonality as concrete as His own to the God He addresses as 
Father ; and yet as so truly typical in His humanity as to 
communicate to the Father a universality cognate to the 
manhood He embodies. To be able to say this of the simple 
history which stands written in our Gospels, and to say it 
not as a thing probably or approximately true, but as true 
absolutely and without any qualification, is to confess that 
their authors have performed a task of incomparable difficulty. 
To give a human portrait so gracious as to exalt and ennoble 
our very idea of Deity, is a feat which no other piece of 
historical literature has achieved or even approached. 

(b) But the other literary difficulty may be described as 
even more insuperable. Jesus, as conceived by both the 
Synoptists and John, was no ordinary person ; He was rather 
such a personality as had never appeared in history before, 
yet He had to be presented in a history. Let us attempt to 
understand their difficulty by putting it as a problem we have 
ourselves to solve. Suppose, then, we had to describe the 
character and career of a person possessed of the miraculous 
powers attributed to Jesus ; suppose we had to make the 
history at once express the power and become the character, 
and yet be entirely real and credible to men with the common 
experience and critical intelligence of their race — how should 
we proceed ? what sort of terms should we employ ? what kind 
of incidents select ? We are told that our hero is to be a person 
who has power to heal the sick, unstop the ears of the deaf, 
open the eyes of the blind, and even raise the dead ; or, to make 
the case even more real, suppose we had these two texts given 
us as a thesis which has to be elucidated and illustrated by 
means of an appropriate history : " In the beginning was the 
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was 



HOW WE SHOULD WRITE HIS HISTORY ? 351 

God " ; l " And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, 
and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from 
the Father, full of grace and truth." 2 Our initial difficulties 
would no doubt concern the relation of the natural and the 
supernatural in Him ; the outer form must be made worthy 
of the divinity that dwells within, yet how can it be worthily 
housed in flesh ? and if it be so housed, how could men bear 
His glory, forget, ignore, or misunderstand the sight, or live in 
His presence their commonplace, sensuous, mean, indifferent 
lives ? We should thus have to surround Him with a fit 
and awed society, and ought not this society to be like a 
nimbus or translucent cloud penetrated by His indwelling 
glory ? And the more we were driven in this direction the 
more violent and fantastic would the history become, in form 
more akin to mythology or fairy legend than to history. 
For we should not dare to make Him as regards Himself 
subject to those very laws of nature which He was able, on 
man's behalf, to transcend. That would be too flagrant a 
contradiction of the probabilities in the situation. Hence He 
must be represented as remote from commonplace humanity, 
and especially without liability to disease, weakness, suffering, 
death. And what sort of speech should we attribute to Him ? 
How conceive the mind which the speech was to reveal ? 
Ignorance, of course, would be entirely unbecoming in a per- 
son so endowed. The future must be open to Him ; from 
Him the secrets of God could not be hid ; the past would be 
as clear as the future, and every reference to nature and his- 
tory, to man and events, would express a knowledge that could 
not err. It would thus be impossible for Him to accommo- 
date Himself to the conventions of His time, use its language, 
accept its theories, and move amid its people as one of them- 
selves. To do this would be to be false to the supernatural in 
His nature ; yet, unless He did this, how could He appear in 
any historical narrative ? We should be tempted, when we 
1 John i. 1. 2 John i. 14. 



352 THE EVANGELICAL HISTORY CONCEIVED 

thought of the marvellous person, to represent all He did as 
gigantesque, and all He said under the form of the mysterious 
and the oracular. But the more stupendous the representation 
grew, the more abnormal, contra-natural, incredible, would the 
whole conception become, and we should be forced to abandon 
the task, confessing that a work more impossible to literary 
art had never been proposed to man. 

And how do the Gospels deal with this problem ? In the 
most surprising way. The highest speculation is embodied in 
the simplest history. He who is conceived as " the Word 
become flesh " is represented as the most natural character in 
all literature. In Him there is nothing obscure, dark, or 
mysterious ; He seems to lie all open to the day. His words 
are simple and plain ; His thought is always clear and never 
complex. He is the last person who could be described as a 
man of mystery. He does not study or practise any art of 
concealment. He calls His disciples, and they live with Him, 
and He lives with them as a man among men. He does not 
claim to know the secrets of nature or the forgotten things of 
history, or the day and hour of destiny, which the Father 
alone knoweth. 1 He does not stand on His dignity, or require 
men to observe the order of their coming and going. A Jew 
who comes by night is not refused an audience, for he has 
come in deference to his conscience, even though he comes by 
night in deference to the Jews ; but Jesus speaks to him as if 
all men stood before Him in that one man, and as a simple 
matter of fact they did so stand. While He rests, tired 
and thirsty, by Jacob's Well, He speaks with the woman of 
Samaria and asks from her water to drink, and then He 
addresses to her words the world was waiting to hear. We 
see Him loved of man and woman, loving as well as loved, 
living the homely, natural, beautiful life of our kind. His is 
the common, every-day, familiar humanity, which suffers and 
rejoices, knows sorrow and death. But this humanity is all 

1 Mark xiii. 32. 



WITHOUT THE MYTHICAL IMAGINATION 353 

the more divine that it is so natural ; it is man become the 
child of God, embosomed in the eternal, a nature transfigured 
by the indwelling supernatural. The simple history may be 
said to clothe the Infinite, and it makes by its very simplicity 
the Infinite all the more manifest. Truth enters at the 
lowliest door, for only so can it come to all men. There is 
nothing so universal as nature, and the truth which would 
reach all must assume a form intelligible to all ; and this 
means that man, who is the image of God, is the fittest 
vehicle for the revelation of the God whose image he is. 

2. We may say then that were the Gospels inventions, 
whether mythical or conscious, spontaneous or purposed, 
they would be the most marvellous creations of literary art 
which we possess. The underlying idea is majestic, sublime, 
complex, but the history which embodies it is simple, sober, 
sane, while the person in and by whom it is realized is the 
most natural and human character in all literature. Present 
the idea to the mythical faculty, and it would weave out of it 
a gay and variegated web, as it were a tapestry crowded with 
the adventures of the faeriest wonderland ; present it to the 
disciplined imagination, and it would feel that the theme was 
vaster than it had strength of pinion to carry. But the 
Evangelists are saved by their very simplicity ; they tell their 
tale, they report the words of their Master, and then they 
leave their history and their logia to sink into the reason and 
wake the wonder of men. And what is the result ? Stated 
in the soberest way, we may put it thus : The Gospels have 
done for Jesus — and through Him for man, and all that man 
signifies — what the imagination under the long discipline of 
science has attempted to do for the earth — viz., so placed our 
time in relation to eternity, our space in relation to immensity, 
as through the greater to explain the less, though only by 
the less can we know and understand the greater. Here we 
swim in the bosom of two infinities, and only through these 
infinities can the process, by which our finite has come to be, 

P.C.R. 23 



354 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

be conceived. To our fathers earth had no mystery. It was 
but a narrow plain, bordered and washed by the inviolate sea. 
It could hardly be termed venerable ; its whole history lay 
within the brief period of six thousand years. On a given 
day in a given month of a given year, God had spoken, 
and through His speech the earth had in six successive days 
become what we know it to be. But now inquiry has crept 
slowly back through the centuries behind us, pushing time 
before it as it crept, and the few thousands of years have 
lengthened into millions ; and as man has in imagination 
ascended this vast avenue of ages, he has seen the suc- 
cessive generations of being slowly descend in the scale 
until organic being has disappeared ; and he has stood in 
thought on an untenanted earth, a slowly cooling mass, 
with fire within, with vapour around, like a monster sleep- 
ing in its own thick breath ; while the vapour, slowly 
condensing, forms the seas, and the mass, cooling, hardens 
into the rocks. And even here the imagination has not 
remained ; it has travelled back, and has looked out into 
the void which is the womb of time, and seen the raw 
forces of things mustering for their creative career, the 
atoms falling through space, striking against each o^her, 
aggregating, combining, here solidifying so as to form a 
sun, there throwing off smaller masses which formed them- 
selves into planets, though rigorous law so bound the severed 
masses together as to make them constitute one system. 
And then the imagination, unexhausted by its backward ex- 
ploration through time, has crept out into space, pushing 
before it the walls that limit our immensity, and by the help 
now of the telescope, and now of the photographic plate, it 
has added realm upon realm of being to our known and 
observed universe, till we feel as if earth were but a mote 
floating in the midst of a measureless expanse, which yet is 
no wilderness, but rather a fair and fruitful land, peopled with 
innumerable worlds. But infinitesimal as seems the earth in 



AS EPITOME OF THE UNIVERSE 355 

this infinitude, it yet for us holds the secret which explains it. 
It is one of the mighty host amid which it swims and floats. 
It shares their being, it partakes in their life, it marches in 
their order, it belongs to their system. We, though but a 
part, are yet in and through and because of the whole ; and 
so in us the problem of the whole is concentrated. Our 
existence, little as it seems, is big with the meaning of the 
universe, holds the only solution we can ever find of the over- 
mastering mystery of being. 

Now just as our earth becomes at once more majestic and 
intelligible through these infinities that bound its finitude, 
and as it yet is the key to all their secrets, so Jesus is con- 
ceived by the Evangelists as a mystery that must be read 
through the eternal God, and yet as a reason that makes 
all His mysteries intelligible, credible, lucid, and articulate. 
The secrets which were in the bosom of the Father are so 
manifested in Him as to be perceptible by our grosser sense. 
Hence, within the limits of the sensuous lives a spiritual, ex- 
pressive of things the eye hath not seen, nor the ear heard, 
nor the hands handled. And the humanity which so reveals 
Deity could not be other than universal, embodied indeed 
in a person, but a person who is as essentially related on 
the one side of His being to man in all his phases and in 
all his ages, as on the other side to God. And so to the 
Evangelists He is at once the Son of Adam and the only 
Begotten of the Father. 



CHAPTER III 

THE ETHICAL TRANSCENDENCE OF JESUS 

THE miraculous history is the most local and ephemeral 
thing in literature ; it lives within a given geo- 
graphical and ethnic area, and never outlasts an early stage 
of culture. Mythologies which were once believed because 
of their supernatural machinery are now, on account of 
this same machinery, credible no more. They may help 
the enquirer to see the human mind petrified, as it were, 
at a particular moment in its development, but they can 
never be regarded as permanent products of the mature 
reason or be taken for rational theologies or authentic his- 
tories. The standard of credibility is not indeed uniform, 
nor is belief in the marvellous restricted to simple minds ; 
and when the subtle believe in the supernatural, they do it 
with surprising thoroughness. In this region the Orient 
easily excels the Occident, for narratives which offend the 
critical reason of the European scholar, speak agreeably to 
the speculative genius of the Hindu pandit. If, then, the 
Gospels had been simply miraculous stories, they might have 
lived a precarious life in the East, but in the West they 
would have died long ago and been forgotten. What has 
made them potent and credible, even in the face of belief in 
a natural law which cannot be violated, is that they have 
acted as the frame to the picture of a moral loveliness that 
can never grow old. Yet the idea this picture expresses may 
be more radically opposed to naturalism, whether physical 
or historical, than belief in all the miracles recorded in all the 

356 



IDEALS IMAGINARY AND REAL 357 

mythologies. For physical pre-eminence is by its very 
nature individual and transitory, but spiritual transcendence 
is immortal, with qualities that penetrate to the very heart 
of nature and cover the whole circuit of history. Now the 
Evangelists may be said to have conceived the essence of 
Christ's person to lie in its spiritual transcendence ; and in 
this they but anticipated the mind of Christendom. It is, 
indeed, remarkable what a small part the belief in the 
miracles has played in the life of the religion ; and even this 
part has been due not to themselves but to their moral sig- 
nificance. It is only when we turn to the character of Jesus 
that we begin to escape from the outer court of the temple. 

§ I. The Ethical Ideal of the Gospels 

1. Ethical perfection is a much more delicate thing to 
handle, as well as a much more difficult thing to conceive 
and describe, than physical transcendence. For literary art 
has never yet succeeded in embodying it in an actual person. 
It has given us many a theoretical ideal, which was indeed but 
a category of definitions or a synthesis of abstract virtues so 
adjusted as to look like the articulated skeleton of some 
ancient moral man. But such an imaginary impersonation 
has always suffered from a twofold defect : (<x) it has, like 
the perfect man of the Stoics, so exaggerated sectional qual- 
ities and local features as to make its ideal unsuitable to 
other times, classes and places than those for which it was 
written ; and (/3) it has been without practical efficiency, for 
the unrealized vision is too impalpable to move men either 
to imitation or emulation. But the embodied idea of the 
Gospels is, while personal, so generic as to be universally 
imitable ; and it has proved its potency by accomplishing 
the vastest, if the most silent, of revolutions. Jesus is not a 
creature of the religious imagination, but rather its creator, or 
superlative inspirer ; for He has determined the form it has 



358 ETHICAL SUBJECT AND PAINTER 

assumed and the ends it has pursued in the personal and 
collective histories of Christendom. It is as He appears in 
the Gospels that He has lived in the faith of man, shaped 
his character and governed his destiny. He could not 
indeed have so lived unless His person had borne a supreme 
transcendental idea ; but the idea without the real personality 
would have been a mere dead abstraction. It is this which 
makes the Gospels books of religion rather than religious 
biographies. In a particular person they represent universal 
man ; He is so typical that what He was every man may be, 
and all men ought to become. To follow Him is to save the 
soul ; to assume His yoke and learn of Him is to find in the 
highest duty the most perfect rest. To have His mind is to 
be perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. He is an 
embodied conscience, defining duty and executing judgment. 
To imitate Him is to be obedient to God ; to be faithless to 
Him is to lose eternal life. Foresight of their function is 
evident in every line the Evangelists draw, and history has 
justified their belief that in Jesus they had discovered 
qualities too immortal to die, and too transcendental to be 
overcome by the lapse of time and the change of place. 

2. The writer who would embody in a person dwelling in 
space and time a perpetual and universal ethical ideal, has 
to overcome certain initial difficulties that may well seem 
insuperable. 

i. The subject must not be allowed to appear as a con- 
scious sitter, a person who knows that he is being watched 
in order that he may be sketched as an example for all later 
men. Were he to conceive himself as living his life in the 
eye of the world and for its edification, his mental undertone 
would be that of the actor who plays his part upon the public 
stage, with this difference— that the actor by profession may 
preserve his integrity, but the actor who means his acting to 
be taken for reality is certain to lose it. Conscious holiness 
is foster brother to conscious sin ; the goodness that knows 



MUST BE ALIKE UNCONSCIOUS 359 

itself to be good is but the inward side of the spirit that 
outwardly thanks God that it is not as other men. And this 
is a spirit which other men see nothing in either to admire 
or imitate ; but from Jesus as the Evangelists show Him to 
us this spirit is infinitely remote. His character appears 
throughout as natural, His conduct spontaneous, His motives 
simple, His thought and speech transparently sincere. He 
is without the literary consciousness ; He did not write or 
command anything to be written concerning Himself; neither 
did He seem to think that the craft of letters had any 
concern in Him or He any concern with it. His field of 
action was in the open air, not in the study ; He was con- 
tent to impress Himself on the minds of men, to live 
divinely careless in the present, without any thought of 
how He should seem to the future, yet so conscious of the 
all-seeing and all-enfolding God as to make of the moment 
He lived in an eternal Now. Of all persons who have made 
history no one has had so brief a public life as He, for it 
extended but little beyond two years ; and it was lived face 
to face with nature and in the society of simple men, who 
had no eye for aesthetic features or majestic bearing or any of 
the things the artist in colours or in style so dearly loves. 
He and they were alike in knowing no art but nature, and so 
their transcendent results were attained by nature and not 
by art. 

ii. The writers must be as unconscious of their art as their 
subject is of its being exercised upon him. And the Evan- 
gelists did not know how great a thing they were doing : 
if they had known, they could not have done it, for that 
would have meant that they conceived themselves as work- 
ing, with the whole world looking on, at a model for all men 
to copy. If an author attempted to compose a history with 
a vision of all the ages standing at his elbow and reading 
his words, he would lose the serene eye which reflects the 
truth and would see double. Now what the Evangelists 



360 AN EVERLASTING CREATION 

give us is a real portrait which is yet an undesigned ideal. 
They were not, any more than their great original, literary 
men ; their atmosphere was not the Athens of Thucydides 
or Plato, the Rome of Cicero or Horace. The art of bio- 
graphy was unknown to their race and class, and the only 
literature they knew — if indeed they could be said to know 
it — was in a language which men of the classic tongues held 
to be barbarous. There is indeed one Evangelist who may 
be described as a Greek, but he is confessedly not an eye- 
witness, and only " sets in order " material which already 
existed. They did not dream of deathless fame, or of pro- 
ducing a work which posterity would not let die. They 
wrote to tell what they most surely believed ; but in telling 
their tale they created the only true Krrjfia e? aeL 

iii. There is unconscious but real art in the limits they 
observe, in the shadows they allow to fall upon the sunlight 
of their picture. The temptation of the artist would have 
been to make his hero calm and radiant. He would have 
conceived the sinless as a sorrowless state, untouched by 
frailty or infirmity, undarkened by suffering or sin. But the 
Evangelists are greatly daring : the Jesus they describe is too 
completely a man to be in any respect alien from humanity. 
He is tempted without being overcome of sin ; He can be 
angry and fierce as well as kind and gentle ; He can speak 
words that bite as well as truths that console. He feels the 
bitterness of death, the horror of its great darkness, the 
desolation of being forsaken of God. It is by a supreme 
struggle that He achieves resignation, and in the conflict with 
His destiny He craves human sympathy, though He does not 
receive it. These are things the conscious literary biographer 
would have toned down or hidden, but the Evangelists leave 
them standing, flagrant, in the reader's eye. Without touching 
here the profound philosophy which justifies these traits, we 
may note how near they bring Jesus to man, how much they 
increase His personal charm and the potency of His example. 






THE ACCESSIBILITY OF JESUS 361 

We can think of Him as of our kind — one of ourselves. There 
are multitudes of the saintly less accessible than He, severe 
ascetics, martyrs to conscientiousness, rigorous devotees of 
virtue and self-denial, so remote from all weakness and so 
severe to self-indulgence that we dare not confess our sins in 
their presence, or hint that bur humanity is frail. But we 
can do this before Him, yet in doing it we come to feel more 
ashamed of ourselves and of our sins than we possibly could 
in the face of a sanctity too complete to sympathize with 
our susceptibility to sin. This may seem a paradox, but it 
is a fact ; and it expresses an adaptation of Christ's person to 
human experience which can hardly be explained by accident 
or the operation of any fortuitous cause. 

§11. The Sinlessness of Jesus 

I. It does not surprise us as it ought to find in books 
which have been said to owe their existence to the untutored 
and unchastened oriental imagination, the history of a high 
religious personality written without adulation and eulogy, 
and with a severe and even austere moderation. It is sig- 
nificant that they never speak of Christ in terms of praise so 
ecstatic as Plato puts into the mouth of Alcibiades concern- 
ing Socrates, 1 or as unqualified as those Xenophon employs. 2 
On the contrary, they allow Him simply to unfold Himself in 
the light. They seem to have cared little for external testi- 
mony to His character, judging, perhaps, that an eye-witness 
sees but a single moment in a life and casts upon it but a 
hasty and prejudiced glance. Still, there are a few significant 
witnesses. Pilate, who has the magistrate's eye for crime, 
describes Him as a "just person," in whom no fault or 
cause of death has been found. 3 His wife expresses a like 
judgment. 4 The penitent thief confesses that, while he 

1 Symposium, p. 215 ff. 2 Memorabilia, I. i. 11. 

8 Matt, xxvii. 24 ; Luke xxiii. 22 ; John xix. 6. 4 Matt, xxvii. 19. 



362 THE EXTERNAL TESTIMONY 

himself dies justly, Jesus " has done nothing amiss." x The 
centurion who watched by the cross, and who saw the 
Crucified, described Him as "the Son of God." 2 His enemies 
bear involuntary testimony to His piety when they utter 
their gibe, " He trusted in God." 3 Judas convicts himself of 
sin when he says, " I have betrayed innocent blood." 4 Even 
before His public ministry the Baptist, the most jealous and 
outspoken of all contemporary critics of character, recog- 
nized His moral pre-eminence ; 5 and Peter so sees himself in 
the light of the Master's purity as to cry, " Depart from me, 
for I am a sinful man, O Lord." 6 "I am not worthy to 
touch Thee, and Thou art too holy to touch me." And the 
reserve thus studiously cultivated is but a reflection of Christ's 
own. He does not speak like one who feels as if He stood or 
fell by man's judgment. His challenge to the Jews, " Which 
of you convicteth Me of sin ? " 7 means, indeed, that He 
knows, and they too know, that the only answer possible 
involves the counter challenge. " Why then do ye not be- 
lieve Me, who am true and speak the truth ? " He describes 
Himself as " a green tree " 8 over against the " dry tree," which 
was fit for the burning. He is more explicit to His disciples, 
and says, " The ruler of the world cometh and hath nothing 
in Me," 9 i.e. the master of the sinful finds Me sinless. And 
so He is not of the world, 10 but, like His kingdom, He is from 
above. 11 These high and transcendent claims are not com- 
patible with the consciousness of sin, and His reserve makes 
such utterances the more impressive : He who so studiously 
conceals His soul is to be trusted all the more when His soul 
is surprised into speech. Nor are these sayings weakened by 



I Luke xxiii. 41. 2 Mark xv. 39 ; Matt, xxvii. 54. 

8 Matt. 43 ; cf. xxii. 16. * Ibid, xxvii. 4. 
5 Matt. iii. 14 ; Luke iii. 16. 6 Luke v. 8. 

7 John viii. 46. 8 Luke xxiii. 31. 

9 John xix. 30. 10 John xvii. 14, 16. 

II Ibid, xviii. 36, viii. 23. 






AND THE INWARD CONSCIOUSNESS 363 

His reply to the Jewish ruler : " Why callest thou Me good ? 
There is none good except one, God." 1 He would not 
accept a title out of mere courtesy or politeness, nor would 
He allow to be applied to one who was only a " Teacher " an 
epithet which properly belongs to God alone. And this was 
the more imperative as the ruler uses of the act he would do 
the very term he uses of the Master. He needed, therefore, 
to be reminded that there was but one absolutely good Being ; 
His goodness is original, and all other is derivative, even the 
Son being but the express image of the Father. " There is 
none good but one, God," does not signify " I am bad," but 
rather, " think of My goodness through Him, and judge the 
quality of the acts you would do through what is pleasing in 
His sight." 

2. But more impressive than the explicit is the implicit 
evidence as to the quality of the moral ideal which Jesus 
embodied. 

i. He betrays no consciousness of sin, neither confesses 
it nor asks pardon for it, nor speaks as if He were in 
thought or being alien from God, or had been guilty of any 
act which could have made God alien from Him. His good- 
ness does not begin in any change of heart ; for though He 
commands man everywhere to repent, He nowhere implies 
that He has Himself experienced, or has needed, conversion. 
He speaks throughout as one who does not belong to the 
category of sinners, a thing the holiest men have been the 
least able to do. He is aware, indeed, that sin is common to 
the race, that nothing more becomes man before God than 
the language of contrition and confession, and that he who 
imagines himself to be so good as to be apart from the guilty 
multitude is guiltier than they. He judged sin as no man 
had ever judged it before, and spared it not, whether as incor- 
porated in persons of reputed godliness, or as expressed in 
acts ; whether it lurked in the secret sources of action, lusted 
1 Mark x. 17; Luke xviii. 18. Cf. Matt. xix. 16-17. 



364 THE SINLESS FORGIVES SINS 

in the eye, hid in the thoughts, or sat behind the tongue that 
feared to break into speech. But to have been conscious 
of evil while so judging it would have been, measured by the 
standard He applied to man, to be guilty of intolerable un- 
charitableness and pride. 

ii. What is even more characteristic, and would have been 
in any ordinary case a note of pride still more intolerable, 
is that He forgives while He has no conscious need of 
forgiveness. He said to the sick of the palsy, " Son, thy 
sins are forgiven thee ; " and the scribes, who knew the law, 
charged Him with blasphemy, saying truly, " Who can for- 
give sins but God only ? " J To forgive sins against oneself, 
if such sins there be, is an affectation of superiority which 
it needs a generous man to overlook ; but to forgive the 
sins which concern God, and which only God can know, is 
an act which implies a purity of nature equal to God's own, 
an unconsciousness of sin and a consciousness of holiness 
which we can describe as nothing less than divine. And 
alongside the act stands a most unexpected consequence : 
the men whose sins He forgives hate sin as the unforgiven 
never do. Forgiveness in His hands does not become a 
concession to human frailty, or an encouragement to evil, 
but an injunction against sinning ; the man who receives it 
feels he must sin no more. And there is a parallel yet oppo- 
site fact, what the meaner critic thinks a suspicious inconsis- 
tency between His doctrine and His practice. He judged sin 
seriously ; He was most severe to the offending eye or heart, 
foot or hand ; it was to be plucked out and cut off rather 
than that the man should enter whole into hell. His con- 
science was sensitive to the shadow cast by sin, yet He asso- 
ciated with the outcasts of Israel. The very men who wanted 
to convict Him of blasphemy because He forgave sin, com- 
plained that He was "the friend of publicans and sinners." 2 
They could not understand why He should seek the society 
1 Mark ii. 5-7. 2 Mark ii. 13-17 ; cf. Luke xv. 2. 



YET IS FRIEND OF SINNERS 365 

of the guilty while He was so severe to their guilt. But the 
sinners never mistook the root and reason of His friendship 
for they knew, though the scribes did not, why He not only 
ventured into their company, but felt bound to seek it, even 
while hating the things they loved. He sought it because 
He was their friend ; and because of His very sinlessness He 
could move amid evildoers like one who bore a will 
charmed against their spell, too perfect in its love of purity 
to be seduced towards evil. The Pharisee was but studying 
his own safety when he held aloof from the publican ; the 
consciousness of sin warned him against all dalliance with 
sinners. Our social conventions are the safeguards of frail 
virtue against potent vice, and the policy of isolation is the 
method by which a nature no longer pure fortifies itself 
against natures still remoter from purity. But Jesus knew 
neither fear nor shame, and needed not the protection of 
distinguishing custom or speech, for while their state moved 
His soul to pity, His very presence awoke within them the 
desire after higher things. 

3. But over against His relation to sin and man stands His 
relation to God. There is no saint in the whole calendar less 
distinguished by what we may term the apparatus of religion. 
It was His deficiency in this respect that helped to make 
Him despised and rejected of men. It would be easy to 
find persons in every age and church since He lived more 
zealous than He was in special religious exercises or for 
single virtues. Stones have been worn smooth by the knees 
of His penitents ; martyrs have died at the stake for His 
name, rejoicing amid the flames and insensible to pain ; the 
poor have been served more assiduously than He ever 
served them, and the diseased have been ministered to with 
a care and a tenderness He never surpassed, if indeed He 
equalled. The hermit or the monk who forsook the world 
that he might give himself wholly to the worship of God, 
has in bodily mortification gone beyond anything that is 



366 HE EMBODIED DIVINE PERFECTION 

recorded of Jesus ; while the nun who has hidden herself 
in the cloister that she may attain whiteness of soul, has sur- 
rendered herself to a severer discipline than He ever practised. 
Yet these are but the strenuous labours of persons who are 
miserable through their great desire to win by personal effort 
what He possessed by nature. He lived embosomed in 
Deity, filled, penetrated, transfigured by God, yet not by a 
God who was simply the fulfilment of desire or the infinite 
abyss which swallowed up the very personalities it had pro- 
duced ; but rather a God of transcendent ethical severity, 
whose truth could suffer no falsehood, who was the light 
which could bear no darkness, the good which could tolerate 
no evil, the life which overcame death, the love that cast out 
hate. The extraordinary thing is the co-existence in the 
same person of this total unconsciousness of sin with the 
complete conscious possession of an absolutely holy God. 
For Jesus so lived that He seemed to men the ethical per- 
fection of God embodied in an ideally perfect manhood. 
And indeed He is most really man when He and the Father 
so interpenetrate that they become one, each so mingled in 
the other that He and we alike lose all consciousness of dis- 
tinction, and they who hear or who see the Son hear and see 
the Father. Yet this is not absorption in the manner of the 
/oriental mystic ; the personal is not lost in the universal soul. 
The mysticism which the East has loved is a dream of man's 
disappearance into a deity infinitely absorbent, where he 
attains beatitude by escaping from the form Deity had given 
into the substance Deity is. And the result is a piety of 
languor and quiescence, of ethical lassitude and social isola- 
tion, which fears the burden of self and desires above every- 
thing the chance of laying it down. But in Jesus the 
perfection which God loves is one with the realization of 
personal manhood ; it is the harmony of idea and being, of 
the governed character with the governing thought. Obedi- 
ence was to Him a movement that did not tire, because it 






ORIGINALITY OF THE IDEAL 367 

knew no friction ; beatitude was the vision of God, expressed 
not in voluptuous quiet but in beneficent activity. It was 
out of the conflict of the ideal He embodied with the actual 
He confronted, that the sorrows came which constituted His 
passion and delivered Him unto death. 

§ III. Qualities of this Ideal of Sinlessness 

I. It must be confessed that this moral ideal, drawn by 
oriental peasants innocent of literary art — for Luke but 
repeats and arranges what he had received — is a work of 
stupendous originality. It has no prototype in religion or 
in literature. The mythical theory owed, as we have said, its 
vogue and its verisimilitude to the idea that the Evangelists 
were deeply versed in the Old Testament, and clothed their 
hero in garments which they had borrowed from that vast 
and ancient storehouse. But at the very point where this 
theory, if it were true, ought to have found final verification, 
it finds explicit contradiction and disproof. For the most 
original thing in the New Testament is not the acts or out- 
ward history of Jesus, but His spirit or inner character. It 
is no doubt true that His historical and religious antecedents 
are in the Old Testament ; there, too, are the ideas He 
transfigures, the hopes He fulfils, the institutions He super- 
sedes ; but what is not there is His moral image, the 
personality He becomes. For in the Old Testament there 
is no sinless man with a mission to men rather than to the 
chosen race. Moses indeed is meek and " faithful in all his 
house," but he so sins that he is not allowed to set foot 
within the promised land. David, the hero-king, is described 
as a man after God's own heart, but he is guilty of deeds 
abhorred alike of God and man. Elijah, the most impressive 
figure among the prophets, breaks down in the hour of trial, 
and confesses himself to be a man no better than his fathers. 
Isaiah, the seer of sublimest vision, feels himself to be too 



368 THE MORAL PERSON AS AN IDEAL 

unclean of lip to be a messenger of God. In the prophetic 
vision of the suffering servant of God, who did no violence, 
neither had any deceit in his mouth, 1 there are lines that 
foreshadow the evangelical ideal ; but the vision remained a 
vision, symbolical, typical, an image of collective Israel, until 
He came who so lived as to turn it into a reality. And 
thus it but helps to define and sharpen an antithesis which 
reaches its logical climax in the contrasted creations which 
sum up the character of the two dispensations. The Old 
Testament ends not in an ideal manhood, but in a cere- 
monial institution, in a method for making man, whom it 
cannot make pure within, liturgically clean. The literature 
burns here and there with the noblest ethical passion, but 
the religion refuses to realize its ethical dream, and plants 
the official priest in the place designed for the saint. The 
New Testament, on the contrary, begins not in a sacerdotal 
order, but in a Moral Person ; its ideal is a manhood, not 
an institution ; a creative character, not a purificatory method. 
And in this its greatness and its originality alike lie. All 
religions had, like Judaism, found it easier to create the 
sacred institution than the holy man, though none did it 
with higher energy and greater skill. But Christ opened a 
more excellent way — created a religion by means of a moral 
personality, and so bound the two together that they could 
never more live apart. 

2. Quite as notable as the originality is the catholicity of 
this moral ideal. Jesus of Nazareth is the least local, 
sectional, or occasional type of moral manhood in all litera- 
ture. In their ideals race differs from race and age from 
age. The typical manhood of Greece, while under the spell 
of Homer, is the swift-footed Achilles or the crafty and far- 
travelled Odysseus ; but when under the spell of Plato, it is 
the sage who loved truth, praised virtue, and studied how 
to know and realize the good in the state. The saints of 

1 Isa. liii. 9. 






INDEPENDENT OF RACE AND PLACE 369 

the East would not be canonized in the West, while the 
qualities which the cultured West most admires the civilized 
East holds in disdainful contempt. Few things, indeed, 
are more permanent or more prohibitive of moral sympathy 
and appreciation than racial characteristics. A good man in 
a black skin may be pitied and helped, or patronized and 
misunderstood, by white men, but he would certainly not be 
hailed as a saviour to be believed or as a master to be 
revered and followed. We may say, " beauty is only skin 
deep," but, as a matter of fact, there are few deeper things 
than skin ; it represents not so much a physiological or racial 
difference as an intellectual, a moral, and a social cleavage 
between man and man. The fields of religion and history 
teem with illustrations. Confucius is a sage China worships, 
but the Hindus would despise his ostentatious ignorance of 
the only Being they think worth knowing and his indiffer- 
ence to the only life they consider worth living. The 
ascetic community which is Buddha's social ideal for his 
saints, a Greek would have conceived as the final apostasy 
from good of a person destined by nature to live as a free 
citizen in a free state. The status Mohammed assigns to 
woman is an offence to the domestic ideal of the Teuton ; 
and the way he indulged his sexual appetite makes him more 
deeply distasteful than even the " necessary fiction " which 
he compounded with " the eternal truth," " that there is only 
one God." But the character of Jesus transcends all racial 
limitations and divisions. He is the only oriental that 
the Occident has admired with an admiration that has be- 
come worship. His is the only name the West has carried 
into the East which the East has received and praised and 
loved with sincerity and without qualification. And this 
power it has exercised ever since it made its appeal to human 
thought : it overcame the insolent disdain of the Greek for 
all things barbarian ; the proud contempt of the Roman 
for a crucified malefactor sprung from a hated and conquered 
P.C.R. 24 



370 THE UNIVERSAL MANHOOD 

people ; the vain conceit of a commercial race, which be- 
fore the moral majesty of a moneyless peasant has almost 
wished to forget its passion for gold. And this catholicity 
endures because it is based upon nature. What seemed to 
His own day disastrous to His claims — the want of rank, 
of name and fame and honour — has saved the ideal from 
death, emphasizing the fact that His transcendence was due 
to nothing adventitious, but to Himself alone. If He had 
appeared as Caesar, the majesty of the man would have 
been sacrificed to the ostentation of the Emperor ; if as 
the Roman Augustus, He could not have seemed so sub- 
lime and kingly as He does as Jesus of Nazareth. But 
though all men may see this now, few saw it then. Their 
ignorance and simplicity saved the Evangelists from the 
temptation to make Him appear more royal than He was. 
If they had known imperial Rome, they could hardly have 
refrained from borrowing some of its purple and fine linen 
for His cradle or His grave. If they had known how the 
Gentiles would regard His birth and state, they might have 
tried to hide them under the shadow of the pomp He had 
despised. But knowing Him and knowing nothing else, 
they told what they heard and described what they saw, 
and so created the most immortal work of art in all litera- 
ture, — a character so complete and catholic in its humanity 
that to it alone belongs the distinction of having compelled 
the homage of universal man. 

3. But there is a final quality in the character of Jesus 
which we can, perhaps, better appreciate than even the 
Evangelists : its potency. It had, indeed, in a rare degree 
the attributes of gentleness and inflexibility. He described 
Himself as "meek and lowly in heart," 1 and men love to 
speak of Him even yet as " the humble Nazarene." But if 
" meekness " be understood to mean compliancy, or " lowli- 
ness " the want of self-respect and personal will, or " humility " 

1 Matt. xi. 29. 



THE IDEA OF CONVERSION 371 

the surrender of conscience and reason before the conven- 
tions and imperious commonplaceness of society, or indeed 
any qualities resembling these, no one ever lived to whom 
such terms could be less fitly applied. He is, where duty or 
truth is concerned, the very impersonation of the unconquer- 
able will ; where dignity or right is at issue, it is vain to 
speak of silence or submission ; where pride would overbear 
or justice turn into expediency, He stands up with a front 
that may be broken, but cannot bend or retire. The cross 
signified that man could kill but not subdue Him ; desertion 
and denial came and awoke His pity, but they could not turn 
Him from His goal. The potency of His character is, 
however, best seen in its historical influence, in its being an 
immortal and inexhaustible recreative energy. Under this 
aspect its force may be represented by two facts. 

(a) By acting as the Friend of the publican, who " came to 
call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance," He intro- 
duced the great idea of conversion, set it by His own conduct 
as a duty before His people, and showed how it was to be 
accomplished. His new way of dealing with transgressors 
stood over against the old way, which was the way of pride 
and punishment, of insult and indignity, of a society which 
did not know any better means of protecting its order than 
the destruction of the persons who threatened to disturb it. 
The method of Jesus was remedial, changing the sinner and 
forgiving his sin. He used friendship and affection instead of 
isolation and distrust ; His love played round the man whom 
hate had scorched, waked the goodness lying dormant in the 
heart of guilt, called faithfulness into being in the soul of the 
faithless, out of the man who had been cast as rubbish to 
the void making a pillar for the temple of God. Man has 
been slow to understand what this means, but he is at last 
coming to appreciate the new attitude it created in the good 
towards the evil, the hope it introduced into the lot of the 
oppressed, the sense of duty it begot in those who have in- 



372 SIN FEARED AND SANCTITY LOVED 

herited virtue to those whose main inheritance is vice, and 
the way it has enriched humanity by bringing into its service 
multitudes who would otherwise have sullied its fame and 
marched in the army which rights against its peace. In- 
finite, untouched possibilities lie in this idea of conversion. 
Though to it the Church of Christ owes the most radiant of 
the luminaries that have made its militant night clearer than 
the day, yet we have a long way to travel before we can 
get close enough to His spirit to see it as it is, and to be the 
willing captives of its power. But even so, this new mind 
and attitude is only an incidental consequence from the 
knowledge of His character, hardly visible amid the host 
of His benefactions to mankind. 

(/3) By His transcendent moral purity He has created two 
things which seem opposites, but are correlatives and counter- 
parts, the deepest consciousness of sin and the desire for the 
highest sanctity. Man knew sin before Him ; Hebrew litera- 
ture is full of it. Men, as they thought of God's majesty, and 
knew that they were searched by eyes which were too pure 
to behold iniquity, abhorred themselves in dust and ashes. 
Classical literature knew it, for it is one of the themes on 
which Seneca speaks almost like a Christian apostle. Yet 
it is true that there was before Christ no such consciousness 
of sin as He, by His very sinlessness, created. There were 
ritual offences which ritual could remove ; there were lapses 
from virtue which repentance could wipe out ; there were 
even transgressions against God which His mercy could cover 
and forgive ; but there was no such thing as a sin which ca-t 
its shadow upon the life of God. And sin has become to us 
not a ceremonial accident which the only sort of sacrifices 
man could offer might atone for, but an offence so awful in 
its guilt as to involve the passion of God and the death of 
His Son. Hence comes the tragedy of Christian experience 
— the co-existence and conflict in the same soul of a double 
sense, a fear of sin that almost craves annihilation, and a 



THROUGH THE VISION OF GOD 373 

love of holy being that yearns towards the vision of God. 
Yet these are both due to the action in us of the ideal sinless 
personality, and express the love by which He guides man 
into the light of life. 



§ IV. Sinks sites s and the Moral Person 

But we here touch questions concerning the function of the 
sinless personality in religion and religious thought, and the 
cause or reason of His appearance in history, which properly 
belong to a later stage in our discussions, and which must be 
left till then. There are, however, two questions which, as 
implied in the evangelical Histories themselves, ought to be 
noticed here: (1) The idea of moral perfection or sinlessness, 
and (2) how it affects our conception of the person and His 
history. 

I. Sinlessness, though a negative term, is here used in a 
doubly positive sense. It applies to both nature and conduct, 
brings both under the same moral category, and so denotes 
what a person is as well as what he does. The two senses 
are, indeed, organically connected, since the quality of the 
nature is expressed in the conduct ; while the conduct reacts 
upon the nature, uplifting or depressing it, enlarging or 
diminishing its good. The ancient maxim said : " Good acts 
do not make a good man, but a good man does good acts ; 
the good fruit is made by the tree, not the tree by the fruit." 
This signifies that moral nature is more radical than moral 
action, and, as the prior in being, requires earlier and more 
careful cultivation. But there is more here than a distinction 
of time ; there is one of cause and ground. Man gets his 
nature, but he wills his acts ; for the first, others are more 
responsible than he ; for the second, he is responsible more 
than any others, though the responsibility is not unconditioned. 
A vast and mixed multitude of factors help to determine the 
coming and the character of the human being. He does not 



374 SINLESS NATURE NOT EXPLAINED 

begin to be as an isolated unit or a characterless individual ; 
but he exists, as it were, before he is born. He starts on his 
career as an historical and social being, though his history is 
ancestral rather than personal, and he lives in society medi- 
ately rather than directly — in his family, not as and for him- 
self. And this means that he steps into a medium for which 
he has been fitted beforehand, possessed of a nature which 
he has inherited. Now here we come upon the fundamental 
difficulty in conceiving the sinlessness of Jesus : — If it be a 
matter of nature before it can become a matter of will, how, 
in the case of one who has a human descent and even an 
historical genealogy, shall we get the nature good to start 
with, the unflecked personality, the undefiled will ? Do we 
not meet here the need for assuming the creation by the 
direct act of God of a new type or species of man, a being 
without father and without mother ? The belief in Christ's 
moral perfection seems thus to involve the occurrence of a 
miracle beside which those described in the Gospels sink 
into insignificance. For it is not enough to affirm the super- 
natural conception ; the real difficulty is conception itself 
under any form. The man who is born of a woman is her 
son, inherits her past, and owes to what it has made her his 
nature and nurture. We may find here the reason that 
induced the Roman Church to supplement the doctrine of the 
supernatural conception of the Son by the dogma of the im- 
maculate conception of the mother ; for the dogma was even 
more a concession to timid logic than to pious veneration 
for the Virgin. But it was a concession to the curious though 
common logic that thinks it simplifies and safeguards one 
mystery by creating another and greater, forgetting that there 
are mysteries which are credible because they are solitary, 
just as the reasons that persuade men to believe in one 
God are all against their believing in two. And the logic 
that justified the Roman dogma ought, in order to full rational 
consistency, to have required an enormous extension of the 



BY ONE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION 375 

process ; and argued that not only Mary, but all her ancestors 
and ancestresses back to Adam, were immaculately conceived, 
and quickened miraculously by grace and against nature. 
And even then the doctrine would not have been safe, for the 
only safety for an incorrupt nature would have been existence 
and growth in an incorrupt environment. Innocence is no 
match for experience, and the battle can never be equal 
if innocence, in all the feebleness of infancy, falls into the 
depraved hands of a deft and experienced age. Hence an 
immaculate conception were useless without an immaculate 
family, and this without an immaculate society and state, 
which speedily brings us to the logical but here impossible 
conclusion that, in order to the existence of a sinless per- 
sonality, we must have a sinless world. 

Let us try, then, whether we can find, without recourse to 
so halting a logic, a more valid and applicable idea of sinless- 
ness. The Evangelists appear to conceive Jesus to be good 
both in nature and conduct. He impersonates for them the 
moral law ; He judges, but is not judged, and is beforehand 
described as " holy." 1 But holy in what sense ? Not in any 
sense that excluded liability to temptation, which implies not 
only the ability to sin, but susceptibility to sin's seductions. 
There is a distinction between an impeccable and a sinless 
nature ; the impeccable is incapable of sinning ; the sinless 
has the capacity to sin, but has not sinned. It would be quite 
incorrect to use the term sinlessness of God. He is absolute, 
and cannot change ; infallible, and cannot err ; and so, to 
ascribe to Him whose attributes are all positive a negative 
quality would be a logical impropriety. But sinless is the_ 
proper term to use of a nature which, with the capability of 
erring, yet has not erred ; it is free from sin, yet possesses a 
will that can be tempted and may fall. The terms that may 
be used of moral natures are these: — Good, holy, innocent, 
evil. " Good " is absolute and exclusive, fixed and stable, 

1 Luke i. 35. 



376 WHAT SINLESSNESS IS 

untemptable and infallible; "holy" denotes a character 
achieved and defined, a nature which has learned obedience ; 
" innocence " describes a being without positive qualities, 
which has attained nothing, but may become anything — 
a mere potentiality, all the possibilities of evil and good 
lying latent within it ; " evil " qualifies a nature which has 
been tried and found unworthy, a will which has sinned 
and become depraved. " Good " is predicable of God only ; 
He alone as good can neither be tempted nor sin. " Holi- 
ness " is the attribute of saints and angels, who have been 
sanctified by the truth and become Godlike. The "innocent" 
is the untried, who is capable of becoming either angel or 
devil ; while " evil," as regards both state and character, is 
the man who has fallen from innocence, whether his mind be 
one of penitence or obstinacy. Now, sinless is a term which 
may be distinguished from all these. It is stronger than 
innocence, for it implies tested faculty — will tried, but not 
overcome. It is more comprehensive than holy, for the holy 
may, on the one hand, be men saved from sin, and, on the 
other, men who have attained beatitude ; but the sinless has 
done no sin, and yet lives in deadliest conflict with it and in 
sorest trouble from it. Yet the basis or starting-point of 
sinlessness is innocence, as its end is holiness, which will be 
eminent and meritorious in the very degree it has been at- 
tained without lapse. And so sinless is the word which most 
fitly describes Jesus as He was in the days when it became 
God to make Him " perfect through sufferings." * He had a 
nature which did no sin, but He faced the sin which could 
show no mercy to His nature ; and in trying to conquer 
His will, it caused His passion and compassed His death. 
His humanity was no make-believe, nor the temptation a 
mere docetic process — a stage drama which He played in the 
actor's sock and buskin — but a grim wrestle between the 
tempter and the tempted. And it did not end with the forty 

1 Heb. ii. 10. 



DISTINGUISHED FROM INFALLIBILITY 377 

days, for, as Luke significantly says, " the devil departed from 
Him for a season," 1 i.e., departed only to return at many times 
and in many forms, in the trouble of His soul, 2 the weakness 
of His flesh, 3 the agony of Gethsemane, 4 and the desertion of 
the cross. 5 The disciples continued with Him in His tempt- 
ations, 6 and knew Him to be in all "without sin." 7 What 
He suffered proved Him to be of our kin ; what He achieved 
showed how much He differed from all who had been before 
Him. The humanity, and the sufferings needed to test its 
sinlessness, were His, but the fruits of His victory are ours*. 

Sinlessness as thus construed denotes a moral quality 
whose intellectual equivalent would be freedom from error, 
i.e. a knowledge that so saw all things as to permit no ignor- 
ance and admit of no mistake. But a being of whom this 
could be predicated could not be conceived as either created 
or dependent. He would require a memory and an experi- 
ence that went back to the beginning of things, and an eye 
that while it saw everything misread nothing. But this is 
the attribute which we call in the Creator omniscience, and 
which has nothing in any creature to correspond with it. 
To affirm that a given person so knew what every day and 
every hour would bring forth, that ignorance of any thing or 
event was impossible to him, would be to say he was God 
and not man. But sinlessness is essentially the note of a 
being at once dependent and perfect ; for as dependent he is 
under law or authority, and as perfect he must have com- 
pletely obeyed. In other words, the only condition that will 
save an intellect from error is the knowledge of all things 
that have been, are, or are to be ; but the one condition 
needed to help men to righteousness is the will to obey. 
Hence the nature that cannot err is infallible, but the nature 
that is obedient is sinless ; the one term denotes a quality 

1 Luke iv. 13. 2 John xii. 27. s Matt. xxvi. 41. 

4 Matt. xxvi. 38. 5 Matt, xxvii. 46. 6 Luke xxii. 28. 

7 Heb. iv. 15. 



378 SINLESSNESS AND HUMANITY 

which the nature has in its own right, the other a quality 
which has been acquired by the exercise of its own freedom. 
Infallibility inheres in the person or society which possesses 
it, the sovereignty which sinlessness obeys inheres in another. 
Now it is significant that Jesus as expressly disclaimed om- 
niscience as He claimed to do always the will of God. He 
left knowledge of the times and the seasons in the hands of 
the Father ; but He Himself ever did what was well-pleasing 
in the Father's sight. The note of His person was sinless- 
ness ; it was not the omniscience of Deity. 

2. We are now in a better position to consider how the idea 
of sinlessness affects our conception of Christ's person and 
history. For one thing, it is evident that it is an idea which 
suits the historical person — leaves Him the son of Adam 
according to the flesh, and the Son of God according to the 
Spirit. By virtue of the first He was, while innocent, peccable 
and temptable ; by virtue of the second He endured in the 
face of temptation, remained sinless and became holy. What 
we call the Passion was a real agony — our name for the awful 
struggle of sin against a pure and obedient will, and for the 
resistance of the will to the sin. His was the one will sin failed 
to overcome ; and in what sense its failure was man's victory 
we shall yet see. For a second thing, the idea shows how 
His humanity could be at once real and ideal. Man as a 
moral being was designed for obedience ; through it and in 
it, and not otherwise, he could attain perfection. The man 
wholly obedient is perfectly moral — a human being as God 
meant him to be ; and so he does not so much transcend as 
realize nature, though to be the only person in history who 
achieves it is to transcend empirical nature while realizing the 
ideal. For a third thing, He who achieves this end is not so 
much taken out of humanity as placed at its head, and so 
becomes " the Firstborn among many Brethren." * While 
the most eminent, He is also the most imitable, the symbol 

1 Rom. viii. 29. 



IMITABILITY AND GODLIKENESS 379 

of what obedience to the highest law of being can make the 
man who obeys. For a fourth thinsr, it shows how moral 
perfection realizes rather than disturbs the balance of man's 
powers. To be sinless is to be God-like, but it is to be man 
and not God. It is to realize perfectly all that is contained 
in the creature's dependence and the Creator's sovereignty ; it 
is to accept and faithfully fulfil the duties and the relations 
these terms denote and define. It is to be perfect in the 
sense, though not in the degree, that God is perfect — to 
be miniatures of Deity, visible images of the invisible God. 
And so the sinlessness of Jesus leaves us face to face with 
questions which may yet carry us into regions of high philo- 
sophical and historical discussion. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY INTERPRETED BY HIMSELF 



A. The Teaching and the Person 

THE character and teaching of Jesus are so mutually 
elucidative that neither can be construed in isolation 
from the other. He could not have spoken as He did unless 
He had been what He was, nor being what He was could He 
have continued dumb. Their congruity is so complete and 
reciprocal that the character becomes more credible through 
the word and the word more potent through the character. 
It was insight into their connexion and organic unity that 
made the Evangelists so carefully incorporate the Logia and 
the history ; they meant us to read them together even as they 
themselves did, and interpret the words through the acts, 
the acts through the words, and both through the person. 
Psychology as a science is young, but as an art is old ; and it 
is an art without which no one can be eminent either as 
biographer or as historian. For it signifies the faculty that 
sees in character the reason of conduct and speech, and reads 
speech and conduct as the expression and counterpart of 
character. History and the drama are both alike children of 
the imagination ; and the more constructive the imagination 
the more perfect will its products be. The dramatist sees a 
character, and through it and for its embodiment he con- 
ceives a history, in order that he may enable others to see 
what he has seen. The historian by a study of words and 
acts gets to know the men who constitute his history, and 
then he writes it in order that, by placing the events he 

380 



THE NEW CONSENSUS GENTIUM 381 

narrates, as well as the ideas and motives he describes, in rela- 
tion to their causes in the men he knows, he may make the 
moment it covers an intelligible, if not a consistent and 
rational, whole. Hence where documents and occurrences, 
literature and history are so indissolubly interwoven as they 
are in the Synoptic Gospels, the critic needs both historical 
imagination and philological knowledge. Without the former 
he cannot turn the latter to any real account. The Jesus 
of criticism easily becomes even more unhistorical and in- 
conceivable than the Jesus of dogma, without coherence, 
without reality, too shadowy to be grasped, too subjective to 
be a real person in history. Hence it may be well if we 
substitute for the critical the psychological method and 
attempt to construe Jesus from within, i.e. look at His acts 
and achievements through His consciousness. 

§ I. The Teaching and its External Characteristics 

I. We are of course here concerned with Jesus under a 
special category, as the Founder of a religion ; and what we 
have to discover is not simply what the Evangelists thought 
and meant us to think, but still more whether He Himself 
had any consciousness of the work He was doing, or was to 
cause to be done. And at the very outset we may be sur- 
prised at what may seem a serious paradox. While there is 
in no religion any proper parallel to the claims made by His 
church on behalf of His person, there are yet in most of the 
historical faiths parallels to His most characteristic sayings. 
But this can only surprise those who forget the catholicity 
of His manhood. What used to be known as the consensus 
gentium, or the agreement of all peoples and religions in 
certain beliefs, was held to be a cogent witness to the truth of 
these beliefs ; and so it is but natural that He who is con- 
ceived as if He were universal Man should in a language 
understood of all men express ideas implicit in all. That 
Christ's teaching as to peace, humility, and forgiveness should 



n 



382 HE IS WHAT HE TEACHES 

be anticipated by the Tao-teh King as well as by certain 
Jewish Rabbis, or that the Confucian classics should contain 
His Golden Rule, even though it be in a negative form, ought 
to be no more extraordinary than that the belief in Deity 
should be common to all religions. That the Dhammapada 
should contain precepts on self-denial, renunciation, disciple- 
ship, and the service of one's neighbour, or that the Bhagavad- 
Gita should speak of God's indwelling in the soul and the 
soul's thirst for God, in terms not unworthy of Jesus, is no 
more wonderful than that similar ethical ideas should have 
been incorporated in dissimilar natural religions. That Plato 
should have written of truth and beauty, Paul of charity, and 
John of love with a sublimity and a tenderness that would have 
become the Master, is what is to be expected of the soul that in 
its serener and saner moments knows itself to be the son of 
God. The fact, then, that the human spirit in its most exalted 
moods has uttered thoughts akin to His ought not to make us 
disesteem the truths the man in Him speaks to the man in 
us, but rather to esteem them the more highly. This con- 
sonance of His mind with the ideal in ours has its counter- 
part in the agreement of thought and being, speech and 
character, idea and reality in Himself; and these two 
harmonies signify that He possesses veracity of nature in its 
completest and most excellent form, realization of the idea of 
humanity and obedience to its truth. 

2. As to its external characteristics, the teaching is so 
small in quantity, that sifted from the narrative in which it is 
embedded it could be written on a few sheets of paper and 
read in an hour. It was the product of a ministry so brief as 
to be confined within a period more fitly reckoned by months 
than by years. It is without elaboration, so much so that 
Pascal was justified in saying, that Jesus said the deepest 
things so spontaneously and simply that it almost looked as 
if He did it without pre-meditation. He was so careless as 
to its preservation that He never wrote anything Himself, or 



HIS SIMPLICITY AND SPONTANEITY 383 

commanded anything to be written, or selected any disciple 
because of his facility with the pen. His words are in the 
strictest sense spoken words cast into the air like seeds which 
the vagrant winds are free to carry whithersoever they list. 
And His teaching makes no claim to respect as literature, is 
without pomp of diction, elegance, preciosity, classicism, or 
any quality of style which betokens the influence of academy 
or school. He was but a rustic teacher, uneducated even to 
the unlettered men of Galilee, speaking on the hillside or by 
the seashore, on the village green or in some squalid syna- 
gogue, on the highway thronged by pilgrims or in the city 
where the reign of passion would not allow the people to hear 
with reason. And the men he addressed were even more 
rustic than Himself, sons of the soil and of the lake, whose 
speech was a dialect which the scholar had not touched or the 
man of letters polished. And the forms His discourses took 
were as simple as His language and His audience : — the 
parable which the Oriental finds so natural, so easily uses and 
so well understands ; the quaintly humble tale which speaks 
to his imagination more clearly than the most luminous 
argument ; the proverb which invites endless explanation and 
application ; the sharp question or the unexpected retort 
which grew out of His controversies with the Pharisees and 
priests, or His discussions with His disciples ; the reflection 
on nature and man, on the wayside incident, or the event in 
sacred history ; the overheard meditation, where the soul is 
surprised out of the deep secret it thinks it speaks to God 
alone. Yet in all its forms His speech is living, swift and 
moving, condensed and pregnant, charged with the thought 
that cannot be shut up in the closet but must live in the 
minds and on the lips of men. 

But His discourses have so marvellous a hold on reality 
that their place, their time, and their whole social environment 
may be seen reflected as in a mirror. Nature is there as she 
lies under the clear Syrian sky. The lily blooms in a beauty 



384 NATURE AND MAN AS REFLECTED 

that Solomon in all his glory fails to rival, while the great 
trees spread their branches in the radiant air, the birds build 
their nests in them, feed their young, and are fed by the 
heavenly Father. The vines tended by the vinedresser grow on 
the hillsides ; the fig-tree blossoms on the plain, and speaks 
.now of the summer which may tarry long yet so surely 
comes, and now, laden with figs, of realized hopes, or, again, 
bearing nothing but leaves, of unfulfilled promises. The 
yoked oxen plough the fields ; in the furrows they have 
made the sower walks casting his seed into the prepared 
ground ; while later the corn, white unto the harvest, covers 
the dark earth, and men as they watch it ripening pluck the 
golden ears and rub them in their hands. The lake, like a 
living eye, looks out on the landscape, and the heavens, 
whether in sunlight or in starlight, look down into the lake, 
which now rises tossed and angry at the stroke of the sudden 
tempest, and now lies placid and fair inviting men to come and 
listen while He speaks by its brink. And man is there as 
well as nature. The fishermen, to His eye potential apostles, 
to other eyes but ignorant and unlearned men, sit in the 
shadow of their boats mending their nets, or fare forth upon 
the lake and cast them into the sea, drawing them in here 
empty, and there so full that they break with their burden, or, 
again, leaving them behind in despair of their own lives 
endangered by some furious squall. Women toil and spin 
and grind at the mill, draw water from the well, seek health 
of the physicians, sin in the city, or minister in the home, where 
sisters are jealous and differ from difference of temper, where 
the housewife lights the lamp, sweeps the house, rejoices or 
sorrows with her neighbours, and delights to call them in to 
share her own happiness and celebrate it with a feast. There 
is nowhere so fine or so pure a picture of eternal womanliness, 
the nature that is so swift to see, so keen to feel, so shameless 
in its sinning, so splendid in its penitence, so quick in its 
gratitude, so ungrudging in its service, and so absolute in its 



IN THE TEACHING OF JESUS 385 

devotion. Infants come in their mother's arms to be blessed 
and to be pointed out as types of life within the kingdom. 
Children play in the market place, making games for their 
amusement out of the serious business of their elders ; 
they sleep with the father in the bedchamber, or they sit at 
table, eat, and are filled while the hungry dogs watch for the 
crumbs. Brothers differ over their inheritance ; sons are by 
their expectations made suspicious of their father, the rectitu- 
dinous fearing he may prove indulgent to the profligate ; while 
fathers think that sons dear to them will be as dear to their 
neighbours and dependents. In the city the poor and maimed, 
the blind and lame, are crowded together ; in the market- 
place where the children play the weary labourer stands 
waiting to be hired, and often waits in vain. The rich men 
live in stately houses, are clothed in purple and fine linen, 
"and fare sumptuously every day"; while servants wait at 
their tables, and guests come by invitation, each at once clad 
in fit raiment and expected to know his proper place. 
There are slaves that may be beaten, and to them the fore- 
man is harsher than the master ; and there are workmen who 
may be paid, and they are easily discontented with their 
wages. On the bench there sits a judge of a genuinely oriental 
type, terrible to the poor and the weak, for he neither " fears 
God nor regards man." On the road from the capital to the 
provinces priests travel absorbed in a pride that will not allow 
them to notice the man who has fallen among thieves. At 
the street corner the Pharisee carries himself disdainfully 
before men ; in the temple he boasts his almsgiving and 
fasting, and bears himself proudly before God, while the 
publican tries to stand hidden from hard and curious eyes, 
and does not dare to look up into the face of heaven. The 
representative of Caesar lives and acts like a Roman ; the 
people hate him and fear him ; the sects discuss, academically, 
questions concerning the tribute money, which their scrupu- 
lous consciences would fain refuse to pay, though they are 
p.c.r. 25 



386 THE REAL WORLD INVOLVES 

not strong enough to withstand prudence prompted by com- 
pulsion. The whole Jewish world is there, a compact, coherent, 
living world, which we can re-articulate, re-vivify, and visualize, 
even though the magic mirror in which we behold it is the 
teaching which reveals the kingdom of Heaven. 

3. But these characteristics though we have named them 
external have yet an intrinsic significance. 

i. They have for the evangelical history a positive critical 
and constructive value. Where the world which surrounds 
a man is marked by so much actuality he himself can hardly 
have been a shadow. The mythical imagination clothes 
the figures it idealizes in forms supplied by its own experi- 
ence, i.e. its hero, though his attributes may be those of more 
ancient men, is placed in a world which is neither his nor 
theirs, but that of the men who write their mythological dreams. 
Hence it is certain to be a world full of anachronisms, incred- 
ible through the inconsistencies and mistakes of its makers. 
But the teaching of Jesus lives and moves and is evolved in a 
consistent and actual world. The men around Him are real, 
belong to their own time and state, and to no other ; we can 
mingle with them, think as they thought, hear as they heard, 
tell their province from their features, their class by their 
manners, their race and rank by their tongues. The critic loves 
to test a document by the conditions of its time, or the authen- 
ticity of an obscure history by the public events with which it 
synchronizes. But here he has few sources that he can freely 
use. The Syrian province was too remote from Rome to 
excite much interest there ; Roman writers were few ; of all 
her pro-consuls and soldiers but one had the splendid good 
fortune to call a Tacitus son-in-law. The Jewish references 
to Jesus, Talmudic or Hellenistic, are either too late and 
polemical, or of too uncertain authenticity or date to be 
used as fixed standards of judgment. As a matter of fact, 
it is from Christian sources that we derive the fullest and 
most trustworthy knowledge of the events, the acts, and the 



THE REALITY OF THE HISTORY 387 

persons that bring Jesus into relation with the written history 
of the time ; but this does not mean that we are without 
sufficient tests of authenticity. Far more even than in 
Josephus, or the Jewish apocryphal literature, or the Roman 
publicists and historians, can we find within the Gospels 
themselves the material which constructive criticism can wisely 
trust and safely use. They do not so much narrate a personal 
history as incorporate a whole society ; though they do it 
without intention and without design, yet they do it so com- 
pletely that we may search ancient literature, not excluding 
the history of Thucydides, or the political treatises of Aris- 
totle, without finding anything so exhaustively done. And 
the society they describe is so real, the men who constitute it 
so actual and all so group themselves round the central figure 
that their actuality becomes a guarantee of His. 1 It is not 
thus that either conscious or unconscious invention works. If 
fiction or idealization steals into the portrait of the hero, it 
cannot be excluded from the environment. The background 
and the figure in the front must be adjusted to each other, 
and where nature has so supplied the scene we may be sure 
that art has not been the maker of the person. 

ii. But if Jesus becomes as actual as the society in which 
He moved, then it is evident that He cannot be conceived as 
a detached or separated being who lived in an abstract or ideal 
state. His humanity becomes as real as ours ; He enters into 
our common lot, bears our name, feels our pains, knows our 
weakness and our greatness. He has fallen under the charm 
and the tyranny of Nature, has experienced the fascination 
and vexation of home, has felt on him the thousand plastic 
hands of society, and has known how much it can do to 
mould man and how little he can do to change it. All man 
has is His, and He has what is man's. The actual things of 
time are not to Him dreams or shadows in the imagination, 
but realities, matters of experience which have entered into 
1 Ante, pp. 328-329. 



388 HIS TEACHING TIMELESS, PLACELESS 

His soul as deeply as into ours. The Jesus who teaches in 
the Gospels is to the Evangelists the most actual being in the 
scene they describe. 

iii. The teaching of Jesus, though embedded in a world of 
such severe actuality, is not made by it local or provincial ; 
on the contrary, what we may call its timeless and placeless 
note seems only the more accentuated by its narrow medium. 
The social conditions amid which it was born, and the lan- 
guage in which it was delivered, do not stamp it with their 
racial character and limitations. The sacred books of the 
religions are, as a rule, preserved in sacred tongues ; while 
translation diminishes their significance for the scholar, it 
tends to destroy their sanctity for the people. The Chinese 
classics must be written in the language and with the signs 
the Chinaman knows if they are to possess for him any literary 
and religious worth ; done into English they have become 
books to inform the western man, and have ceased to be 
authorities for the native mind. The Sanskrit of the Rig 
Veda and the Upanishads, of the Epics and the Philosophies, 
is sacred to the Hindu people ; to know it is to hold the key 
of wisdom and of truth ; to discover it required all the tact 
and patience and courage of noted European scholars. 
Hebrew is the tongue in which the Jew praises God, and 
without it his soul would be deprived of the speech 
which is to him his religion. The Koran made the 
Arabic in which it was written classical ; the dialect of the 
prophet became the standard of art and elegance. But 
the words of Jesus do not constitute a sacred language ; 
we do not possess His teaching in the tongue He knew and 
employed. It came to us in a translation, and has lived in 
translations ever since, multiplying itself endlessly without 
ever seeming to lose its vital energy. And this means that 
it has the marvellous faculty of being at home everywhere, 
intelligible in every speech, comprehensible to every mind, 
without country or time, because so akin to universal man. 



AND THE SOVEREIGN IDEALISM 389 

And it is more than curious that the teaching of which this 
can be said is so marked by the actualities of the hour and 
the place of its birth. 

iv. But what is still more of a paradox is the substance 
and scope of the teaching which appears in this narrow and 
local and sordid medium. We may call it the sovereign 
idealism of the world ; and this would be the sober truth, yet 
not the whole truth. It would also be true to say, though 
compared with the whole it means little when said, that Jesus 
dignified and enlarged whatever He touched, and He touched 
all man's deepest beliefs, his most regulative and commanding 
ideals. God He translated into Father, and made man con- 
ceive the Being he most dreaded as the Being who most loved 
him and whom he must love. Man He interpretated by son, 
raised him to a majesty before which the accidents of birth 
and state were humbled when they thought themselves noble, 
and ennobled when they knew themselves mean ; and set him 
as a being of infinite worth face to face with the infinite God. 
Duty he lifted from the dust into which it had fallen, and 
turned it into the obligation to be perfect as the Father in 
heaven is perfect. Love He purified from passion, and quali- 
fied it to be the bond which bound man to God, united man 
to man, organized life into a body of obedience and a realm 
of reciprocal service. On the basis of love to God and man 
He built up a kingdom, out of which the wicked in His 
wickedness was excluded, but into which the most wicked 
could by conversion enter and become the most holy. In 
this kingdom all men were to be brothers and all sons of 
God ; their worship of Him was to be a service of love ex- 
pressed in obedience and realized within the community of 
saints. Instead of outside rules an internal law was to reign ; 
men were to live in the Spirit and speak in the truth, governed 
by a love which would not allow any one to exult in another's 
evil or rejoice in another's pain, but which moved all to a 
universal beneficence. It was a new idea of God, of man, of 



390 WHAT HIS WORD HAS ACHIEVED 

religion, each of these singly, all of them together, and all 
conceived as man's and not as limited to any elect race or 
conditioned by any sacred class. It was wonderful that a 
universal idealism so immense and mighty should have so 
lowly an origin, and come to be in a world so prejudiced, 
pragmatical and divided. 

v. The influence exercised by this teaching stands in signifi- 
cant contrast alike to its origin, to its quantity, and to its 
literary quality. While it did not begin to be as literature, it 
has done more to create learning and letters than all the sacred 
books of the world. More scholars are employed on it than 
on the literatures of Greece and Rome, while speculation, 
poetry, and everything that can be termed imagination in 
modern men have owed to it exaltation and inspiration. The 
art and civilization of Europe are its creation ; it has this 
significant distinction, which it shares with the words of no 
other teacher known in the West — men study it as an ideal of 
life, which they personally, and the State collectively, are bound 
to realize. The most serious reproach to a Christian man or 
society is to have failed to obey the law of Christ. And the 
teaching is conceived to have authority because the Teacher is 
believed to live ; its power to govern and to bind reposes on 
the idea of His personal sovereignty. But the external 
characteristics so regarded and construed, cease to be external 
and become invested with high critical significance ; for they 
show that the teaching can be as little explained by the 
origin, the distribution, and the use of the Logia as the reason 
which is man can be explained by the anatomy of his body. 
Anatomy is a real science, but it is not a complete anthro- 
pology ; were it to claim to be such, it would only become 
ridiculous ; and the criticism which handles documents would 
earn a similar epithet if it were to speak as a sufficient philo- 
sophy of the Christian religion. 



HAS NOT CREATED CHRISTIANITY 391 



§ II. How Jesus Conceives and Describes Himself 

From this discussion of the teaching in its external 
characteristics we must now pass to what is indeed the 
main question it raises : How did Jesus conceive Himself 
and His special function in religion ? One thing is certain : 
the teaching by itself could not have created Christianity or 
achieved universal significance. It does not cover the whole 
of life, whether individual or collective, nor does it even 
profess to deal with some of man's gravest problems, intel- 
lectual, ethical, and religious. There have been crises in 
every State, nay, in every real personal history, where, if 
it had been the only guide, it would have to be described 
as " the light that failed." But the programme of the 
religion lies in the person of the Founder rather than in 
His words, in what He was more than in what He said. 
This may seem an anomaly, especially to an age accustomed 
to think that it believes " the truth for the truth's sake " ; 
but it is natural that words conceived as the vehicle and 
mirror of a transcendental personality should become to the 
reason symbolical of all the mysteries and all the authorities 
that meet in Him. Still, if this be so, the function we assign 
to His person must not be inconsistent with His idea of 
Himself, with the nature of things, or the course of history. 
Hence what here concerns us is His idea of Himself and 
the part this idea played in the creation of the Christian 
religion. 

1. And at the outset we have a most significant thing 
to note, the comparative reserve or even reticence touching 
Himself which He maintains during His earlier ministry. 
He is clear and emphatic enough when He speaks to His 
disciples of God, or the kingdom and its laws ; but concerning 
Himself He speaks not so much in parables as darkly and 
suggestively. He appears to have desired that their con- 
ception of Him should be of their own forming rather than 



392 HE INTERPRETS HIMSELF 

of His communicating, a belief reached through the exercise 
of their own reason and not simply received on His authority. 
— His method was to proceed through familiarity to supremacy, 
not through sovereignty to dominion. If the discipleship 
had been formed on the basis of His divine pre-eminence, 
it would have had no reality, for He would never have got 
near the men, and they would never have come near to 
Him ; aloofness would have marked His way and they 
would have walked as if divided from Him by an impassable 
gulf. And so it was as a man of whom they could learn, 
addressing men who would learn of Him that He called 
them. And He forced nothing, stimulated but did not 
supersede the action of their own minds ; and when He 
asked His great question, " Whom say ye that I am ? " x 
it was as if He had inquired, " What conclusion have you 
as reasonable men been compelled to draw from the things 
which you have seen and heard ? " This method of Jesus 
explains two things : (a) the relative lateness of the period 
at which He invited the confession. It was the issue of 
a lengthened process in slow and simple minds, and to have 
hurried the process would have been to spoil the issue. 
(/3) The immediate and consequent emergence of a new 
type of teaching, which may be described as more concerned 
with Himself than the old, and especially with the work 
required of Him as the Founder of the kingdom of God. 

2. But though we must recognize, because of the reasons 
that prompted it, this early reserve as to the interpretation 
of His person, yet we must also emphasize the fact that 
from the beginning He made on His own behalf the very 
highest claims. Over against the five negative and limitative 
passages which, according to Schmiedel, constitute " the 
foundation pillars for a truly scientific Life of Jesus," 2 I 
would place as more entitled to this character the following 
authentic and characteristic texts : 

1 Mark viii. 27-29 ; Matt. xvi. 15-16 ; Luke ix. 18-20. 2 Ante, p. 303. 



DEFINES HIS PLACE AND FUNCTION 393 

i. He fulfils the law and the prophets. 1 The terms " law" 
and " prophets " denote what we should term the Old Testa- 
ment, the collective revelation to Israel. This Jesus has 
come to "fulfil," i.e. to realize its idea, to actualize its dream, 
to accomplish what it tried but failed to achieve. He who 
so speaks conceives Himself as more than the law, as greater 
than all the prophets, and so He does not explain as the 
scribes, 2 but proclaims as a new ethical authority a new law 3 
and a higher prophecy. 4 

ii. He comes " to call not the righteous but sinners to 
repentance." 5 This idea receives fuller and even finer 
expression in words we owe to Matthew : 6 " Come unto 
Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest." The consciousness of sufficiency for the saving 
of the lost was never more beautifully expressed : it has 
sounded through the ages as an appeal more irresistible 
than any command. 

iii. The command which He addressed to the disciples, 
" Come ye after Me," 7 or, more briefly and emphatically, 
" Follow Me." 8 And some interesting contexts show the 
absolute authority implied in this command. Thus the 
scribe who professes himself willing to follow Jesus " whither- 
soever Thou goest," pleads, when he hears of the homeless- 
ness involved in obedience, to be allowed to " go and bury 
my father " ; but the imperative words, pitiless to the 
pretence of affection, are spoken : " Follow Me, and leave 
the dead to bury their own dead." 9 Again, the young 
ruler, who has inherited "great possessions " and wishes to 
inherit "eternal life," asks what he is to do, and is told : 
" Go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, 

1 Matt. v. 17-18. 2 Mark i. 22 ; Matt. vii. 27. 

3 Matt. v. 22, 28, 32, 34, 39, 44. 4 Matt. xi. 9-1 1 ; Luke vii. 26-8. 

5 Mark ii. 17 ; Luke xix. 10. 6 xi. 28. 

7 iv. 19. 8 ix. 9. 

9 Matt. viii. 18-22 ; Luke ix. 57-60. 



394 THE PRE-EMINENCE OF THE PERSON 

and come, follow Me." l Jesus will brook no rival ; the 
thing man loves most he must surrender if he would obey. 
Finally, He states the terms of discipleship : the men who 
would follow Him must deny themselves and take up the 
cross, 2 for only so can the soul be saved ; and though a man 
may gain the world, yet if he lose his own soul he will 
suffer infinite loss. 

iv. He affirms in His charge to the twelve 3 His personal 
sovereignty in the most impressive forms and phrases. They 
are to be persecuted for His sake ; but if they endure, He 
will confess them before the Father ; to lose their life for 
His sake is to find it ; to do the meanest service in His 
name is to win an everlasting reward. 

v. And His pre-eminence towards man is reflected in 
His uniqueness towards God. He is the Son, all things 
have been delivered unto Him of the Father ; as the Son 
the Father alone knoweth Him, and He alone knoweth the 
Father, and without His action as revealer the Father 
cannot be known. 4 

These texts form an ascending series ; they begin with 
His relation to the past ; the old religion He at once 
supersedes and fulfils ; the person to whom its precepts and 
promises, its offices and institutions pointed, and in whom 
they ended, is greater than they. Then He defines His 
relation to the old mankind : His primary function is to 
save the lost ; and this is followed by His attitude to the 
new mankind whom He calls, commands, and binds to 
Himself by an affection which grudges no sacrifice and is 
equal to any service. And these claims represent a 
sovereignty which only a singular and pre-eminently privi- 
leged relation to the Father could justify. These are claims 
that become the founder of a religion, and, admitted or 
acknowledged, they almost explain its founding. But claims 

1 Markx. 17-22. 2 Mark viii. 34-37. 

3 Matt x. 16-42. 4 Matt. xi. 25-27. 






AND THE FOUNDING OF THE RELIGION 395 

which are to rule the mind and the conscience must have 
as their ultimate basis not a spoken word, but an idea 
which appeals to the reason and satisfies the reason to 
which it appeals. Hence Jesus in asking, " Whom say ye 
that I am?" consciously confesses that His religion will be 
as His person is conceived to be. And so the essence or 
heart of the later or higher teaching may be described as 
the creation of the Christian religion by the interpretation 
of the Christ. 

§ III. The Person and the Passion 

1. But at this point there comes a most extraordinary and 
unexpected development in the teaching. Coincident with 
the new emphasis on His person is the new thought of His 
passion. No one could be less fitly described as " the Man 
of Sorrows " than the Jesus of the " Galilean springtime." 
The idea embodied in Holman Hunt's The Shadow of the 
Cross is false to nature and to history, for Christ's was too 
fine a spirit to make out of its own sorrow a shade in which 
those who looked to Him for love should sit cold and 
fearful ; and we may reasonably infer that before the 
evil days came His customary mood would be the exalta- 
tion born of the splendid ideal He was to realize. The 
morning of His ministry was a golden dawn ; in His early 
parables the sunny side of life so greets us that we may 
almost see the smile upon His face answering the smile 
upon the face of Nature. His spirit is bright, His words 
are serious without being sad, weighted with the ideas of 
God, and duty, and humanity, but not burdened with the 
agony or wet as with the sweat of Gethsemane. Yet even then 
He had thoughts that prophesied the passion. They were 
native to Him, not given or forced upon Him from without. 
Experience was indeed to Him, as to us, a teacher ; and 
as He " learned obedience by the things which He suffered," 
so, apart from the same things, He could not have known 



396 OBEDIENCE THROUGH SUFFERING 

His meaning and His mission. But these were conditions 
rather than sources of knowledge. The notion of a suffering 
Messiah filled a small place, if, indeed, it filled any place 
at all, in contemporary Jewish thought, but He could not 
study ancient prophecy without finding such a Messiah 
there. History showed that the very people who built the 
sepulchres of the dead prophets had refused to hear or even 
to endure them while they lived ; and John the Baptist, slain 
by a foolish king to gratify the malice of a wicked woman, 
stood before Him as evidence of continuity in history. And 
as 'He preached the Kingdom He found that those who 
seemed or claimed to be its constituted guardians were His 
most inveterate foes ; the scribe waited to catch Him in His 
talk ; the Pharisee watched to charge His good with being 
evil ; the priests resisted Him in the temple, which they had 
made into a mart for merchandise. Opposition confronted 
Him at every moment and in every point ; His idea of God's 
righteousness as distinguished from the law's was ma'de to 
appear a grave heresy ; His friendship for sinners was repre- 
sented as affection for sin ; His very acts of beneficence were 
explained as works of the devil, and His doctrine of the 
kingdom was handled as if it signified a reign of lawlessness. 
Such experiences could create only one feeling, that the 
enmity His ministry encountered must ultimately fall upon 
His person ; and as He could not surrender His mission He 
must be prepared to surrender His life. Hence there emerges 
a double consciousness attended by conflicting emotions 
which now exalt and now depress Him. He sees the 
necessity of His death, and does not seek to escape from 
it ; but from the forces which work it and the form in which 
it comes He shrinks with horror and alarm. He perceives 
its functions and issues, and He rejoices to give His life 
a ransom for many ; but, as His life is taken as well as 
given, He suffers agony because of those who take it, even, 
while He feels in the act of surrender joy at doing His 



EXPERIENCE FORETELLS THE PASSION 397 

Father's will. As a result, those elements of the sacrifice 
and death which appear as the first and most essential to 
us, appeared as the last and most incidental to Him. Yet 
to those who can follow and interpret His thought, the new 
Passion is but the old sovereignty seen through its issue, or 
in the method of its achievement. 

2. The new development in His teaching occurs, then, at 
the moment when the disciples had come to conceive Him 
as the Christ ; and it is of Himself as the now confessed 
Messiah, with distinct reference to the idea in their minds, 
that He speaks. The terminology He employs constitutes 
a sort of symbolism. According to Mark 1 and Luke, 2 the 
name He uses to denote Himself as the victim is " the Son 
of Man." Whence this name may have come does not 
specially concern us ; but what does, is that He uses it to 
denote the person who had been termed " the Christ." 
The words of Peter, both before and after, show that the 
disciples understood Jesus to mean by " the Son of Man " 
Himself. It is so unusual for any one to speak of himself 
in the third person, that it has been argued that the name is 
not historical but apocalyptic in its associations, and denotes 
not Jesus, but another — a symbolical being. But the idiom 
is not peculiar to this name ; in certain most authentic 
texts Jesus speaks of Himself as " the Son," 3 and without 
this form of words it is impossible to see how He could 
have expressed His idea. The subject at certain supreme 
moments becomes an object to Himself; He is more than 
a unit, He is a whole ; more than an individual, He is a 
race ; more than an atom, He is a world. Any one who 
has studied Fichte's use of the term " Ego " ought to have 
no difficulty in understanding Jesus' usage of the third as 
well as of the first person. " The Son of Man " is the 

1 Mark viii. 31-32. 

2 Luke ix. 20 22. 

3 Luke x. 17-20 ; Matt. xi. 27 ; Mark xiii. 32. 



398 THE SON OF MAN 

universal form under which He conceives and denotes the 
specific Jewish notion of the Messiah. What the one term 
signified for a single people, the other signified for collective 
man ; yet with a difference, — it was the Messiah conceived 
as the suffering Servant of God ; the hope of the people 
become completely one with the people, afflicted in all 
their afflictions, redeeming them by death. As, then, the 
subject — " the Christ," as the disciples had named Him ; 
" the Son of Man," as He had named Himself — is a repre- 
sentative person, so are those who are to be concerned in 
His death : " the elders, chief priests, and scribes " are 
symbolical of Israel acting in a collective and solemn 
manner. " The elders " are Israel as a State ; " the chief 
priests " are Israel as a Church ; " the scribes " are Israel 
as possessed of the oracles of God. When they are con- 
ceived as working together, their action is conceived as 
Israel's, the work of a civil, sacerdotal, and religious body 
corporate. These contrasted titles then — " the Christ," or 
" the Son of Man," on the one hand, and " the elders, chief 
priests, and scribes" on the other — can only mean that the 
acts in which they were to be respectively engaged, bearing, 
suffering, and enduring, causing and inflicting, death, have 
a more than mere personal significance ; they realize the 
ends for which the Messiah stood by means of the ideas 
for which Israel was the symbol. Thus Jesus conceives His 
death as in form a sacrifice, a means for the reconciliation 
of man to God, though a sacrifice may have been the last 
thing it was intended to be by the men who effected 
it. And the rebuke to Peter shows how necessary Jesus 
thought this view of His death was. His words are remark- 
able : " Get thee behind me, Satan ! for thou mindest not 
the things that be of God, but the things that be of men." 1 
It is hardly possible to avoid the inference that there is 
here a reminiscence of the temptation. Jesus feels as if 
1 Matt. xvi. 21-23. 






AND COLLECTIVE ISRAEL 399 

the tempter, disguised as Peter, was once more showing 
Him "all the kingdoms of the world " ; 1 and He once more 
resists him and casts him out. 

Here, then, we have the culminating idea as to Himself 
and His function ; yet it is an idea so extraordinary and 
unusual, while so distinctive of the religion, that we must 
attempt to understand it as it rises in His consciousness and 
is expressed in His teaching. It is so seldom that we have 
the opportunity of discovering the sources of a potent belief 
and analyzing its primary form and primitive elements, that 
one must not be neglected when it offers ; and we must here 
the more jealously use the opportunity that we can compare 
the present with the later forms and examine its action as a 
factor in the making and in the continuance of the religion. 
Our immediate purpose, however, is to find out what the idea 
signified to Jesus Christ ; its worth for the religion belongs to 
a later stage in the discussion. 

1 Matt. iv. 10. 



CHAPTER V 

THE RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY AS INTERPRETED BY 
HIMSELF 

B. Significance of His Death 

§ I. Growth of the Idea 

I. T 7" AGUE and general as were the terms in which 
V Jesus stated His anticipation of death, it was yet 
at once unwelcome and unintelligible to His disciples. 
For from this point onwards a change which profoundly 
affects their mutual relations may be seen in process. 
Their agreement with Him as to the central matter — His 
Messiahship — only accentuates the radical difference between 
them as to what the Messiah is to be and what He ought 
to do. The " Christ " as Jesus conceives Him is devoted to 
suffering and death ; but the disciples conceive the Messiah 
not in terms they had learned of Jesus, but rather under the 
categories of local tradition and personal interest. The more 
explicit His Messianic consciousness grows the more He 
emphasizes His death ; but the more strongly they believe 
in His Messiahship the less will they permit themselves to 
think of His liability to a death which they can only construe 
as defeat. And so there emerges the most tragic moment in 
the ministry, the bewilderment of the disciples and their 
alienation from the Master. The conflict which had hitherto 
raged between Jesus and the Pharisees is now transferred to 
the innermost circle of His friends; but with this character- 
istic difference : while the old conflict was open, frank, and 



MASTER AND DISCIPLES ESTRANGED 401 

audible, the new was secret, sullen, inarticulate. The signs 
of the estrangement are many. Their ambitions grew sordid, 
and they began to feel as if following Him were sheer loss. 
When He said, " How hard is it for them who trust in riches 
to enter the kingdom of God "—no strange truth in His 
mouth — they were " astonished above measure," and said to 
Him, " Who then can be saved ? " * Feeling as if this 
doctrine threatened them with the lot of the uncompensated, 
Peter, as ready a spokesman of suspicion as of faith, said, 
" Behold we have forsaken all and followed Thee ; what, 
therefore, shall we have? " 2 The natural result was that 
jealousy, envy, and mutual distrust wasted their brotherhood, 
and they disputed by the way as to " who should be the 
greatest." 3 Hence Jesus had to set the little child in their 
midst that he might teach the grown men how to live in 
trust and love. Even thus their greed of place and pre- 
eminence was not silenced, for the ten were moved to indig- 
nation by James and John — two of the most privileged 
disciples — seeking to beguile the Master into a promise to 
give them seats, the one at His right hand, the other at His 
left, in His kingdom. 4 So far did they fall that they attempted 
to do His works without His faith, 5 tried to hinder men doing 
good in His name, 6 and even when His face was towards 
Jerusalem so little had they knowledge of His spirit or His 
mission that they asked authority to command fire from 
heaven to consume a Samaritan village. 7 The picture of the 
alienation is most graphic in Mark : " They were in the way 
going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus went before ; and they were 
amazed, and as they followed they were afraid." 8 He walks 

1 Mark x. 26 ; Matt. xix. 25. 2 Matt. xix. 27. 

3 Mark ix. 34. ; Matt, xviii. 1-2 ; Luke ix. 46-48. 

4 Mark x. 35-41 ; Matt. xx. 20-24. 

5 Mark ix. 17-19 ; Matt. xvii. 19, 20. 

6 Mark ix. 38-40 ; Luke ix. 49, 50. 

7 Luke ix. 51-56. 8 x. 32. 

P.C.R. 26 



4 02 THE DISCIPLES RESIST IDEA OF DEATH 

alone, unheeded ; the words He speaks they do not care to 
hear, for they are confounded, and walk as in a vain show, 
feeling as if the voice which had created their hopes had 
turned into a contradiction of the hopes it had created. 
This was their mood, and it is doubtful whether they ever 
escaped from it while He lived. It helps to explain their 
behaviour during the passion, which was but the natural 
expression of their imperfect sympathy with the Sufferer. 

Jesus' method of dealing with this mood enables us to 
read more clearly His idea as to His sufferings and death. 
He met the protest of Peter by a public reproof, for Mark 
here has a trait which Matthew overlooked : " When he had 
turned about and looked on the disciples, He rebuked Peter" 1 
— an act which the apostle had evidently never forgotten. 
But much more significant than the reproof is the manner 
and the circumstances under which He repeats and enforces 
the teaching as to His death. All the Synoptists agree in 
placing after this incident the words in which Jesus affirms 
that those who follow Him must not shrink from the fellow- 
ship of the cross. 2 They must deny themselves, willingly 
lose life for His sake and the Gospel's, live as those who love 
the soul and fear no worldly loss. But not satisfied with 
indirect instruction, He, under conditions which speak of 
exaltation, returns to the idea which they so hated. He 
speaks of it as they were descending from the Mount of 
Transfiguration. 3 While men were wondering at the things 
He did, seeing in them " the mighty power of God," He bade 
His disciples let His sayings sink down into their ears, "for 
the Son of Man shall be delivered into the hands of men." * 
But one Evangelist is careful to add, " They understood not 

1 viii. 33. a Mark viii. 34-38 ; Matt. xvi. 24-28 ; Luke ix. 23-27. 

3 Mark ix. 9, 12 ; Matt. xvii. 9, 12. Luke makes " His decease which 
He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem " the subject on which Moses 
and Elias are said to have discoursed (ix. 31). 

4 Luke ix. 43, 44 ; Mark ix. 30, 31 ; Matt. xvii. 22, 23. 



THE MASTER EXPOUNDS THE IDEA 403 

this saying." ' His answer to James and John, when they 
wanted the Samaritan village consumed, was, " The Son of 
Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them " ; 2 
which means, read in its connexion, to save even by suffering 
at their hands. Then at the very hour when the alienation 
was most complete, He would not hide the offence of the 
cross from their eyes, but once more predicted His death and 
the part " the chief priests and the scribes " were to take in 
it, 3 though even yet, as Luke says, " this saying was hid 
from them, neither understood they the things which were 
spoken." i So far, however, Jesus has only repeated His 
thought in its original form, His purpose seeming to be to 
make it as clear and distinct to the consciousness of the 
Twelve as it was to His own. He could not attempt to 
expand or explain it to men who would allow it no entrance 
into their minds. But their mutual rivalries, which were 
the fruits of their alienation from Him, created at once the 
opportunity and the need for further exposition ; and He 
added to His prediction of the fact and manner a word as to 
the function and end of the Messianic death : " The Son of 
Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
give His life a ransom for many." 5 

2. This saying marks a very clear advance in the expres- 
sion of His consciousness, or the definition of His own idea 
as to His death. 

(a) Baur argued that this saying is so contrary to the 
thought and habit of Jesus that we must suppose He either 
never said it or said it in quite another form. 6 The exhorta- 
tion to the disciples is complete without it, and so, said the 
critic, these words were made for Him, not used by Him. 
But it is hardly possible to conceive a more gratuitous con- 
jecture. The words will stand any test, critical or diacritical, 

1 Luke ix. 45. 2 Luke ix. 56. 

* Mark x. 33 ; Matt. xx. 17-19. 4 Luke xviii. 31-34. 

5 Mark x. 45 ; Matt. xx. 28. 8 Neutest. Theologie, 101. 



404 THE DEATH A RANSOM 

that can be applied to them. The heart of the narrative 
implies its conclusion, for what do the " cup " He has to 
drink, the "baptism" He is to be baptized with, signify? 
Not surely the mere idea of service, but the idea of suffering 
endured to its tragic end. Here, if anywhere, we have a 
Xoyiov aXrjdivov, spoken to jealous, unsympathetic, disputa- 
tious disciples, while He and they were going up to Jerusalem. 
It is something to have this fragment of authentic speech, 
which has, as it were, seized and preserved His articulate 
voice in the very act of defining Himself and His mission. 
It is easy to import into the clause too much of our technical 
theology, but it is still easier to simplify it into insignificance 
by attempting to keep all theology out of it. The key to its 
meaning has been commonly found in Xvrpov, and in a measure 
correctly. In each of His formal references in the Synoptists 
to the death there is a special terminus technicus which may 
well claim to be a key-word. In the first it is Xpto-ro?, 
in the last hia&r)icr), here Xvrpov. Now Xvrpov is a term easy 
of interpretation by itself, but here the context in which it 
stands makes it peculiarly difficult : for while the persons 
ransomed are specified, He neither defines the state out of 
which, or the state into which, they are redeemed, nor the 
need for the ransom, nor the person to whom it was paid, nor 
the precise respect in which it is the issue of His surrendered 
life. Ritschl, 1 in an elaborate dissertation, argues that Xvrpov 
here, as in the LXX., where it translates "133, signifies means 
or instrument of protection {Schutzmittel), which may in 
certain cases become means or price of release {Losepreis). 
He examines various typical texts in the Old Testament, and 
comes to the conclusion that those which present the most 
exact parallel to the words of Jesus are Psalm xlix. 7 and 
Job xxxiii. 24, and he thence deduces three positions : (i.) 
that this ransom is conceived as an offering to God and not 
to the devil ; (ii.) that Jesus did instead of the many, what no 
1 Christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung u. Versdhming, ii. 69-89. 



BUT FROM WHOM OR FROM WHAT? 405 

one either for himself or for any other could do ; and (iii.) 
that Jesus in thus defining His work specifically distinguishes 
Himself from man, who must die, as one who dies freely, or 
who by His own voluntary act surrenders His life to God. 
So he finally defines Xvrpov as "an offering which, because 
of its specific worth to God, is a protection or covering 
against death." The positions are interesting, and we see 
how they are reached, but what we do not see is any con- 
nexion between the method of reaching them and the words 
of Jesus. Wendt * is less elaborate and exhaustive. He 
argues that the term is used to express one idea — the deliver- 
ance of many, i.e. " all those who will learn of Him," by 
Christ's voluntary sufferings "from their bondage to suffering 
and death " ; but he has nothing to say as to the person or 
power to whom the ransom was paid. Beyschlag 2 considers 
the ransom not a payment to God, but a purchase for God, 
and a being freed from the dominion of a power hostile to 
him, the bondage neither of death nor even of mere guilt 
but of sin. 

(b) Let us reverse the order these scholars have followed, 
and instead of coming to the context through the term, come 
to the term through the context. The sons of Zebedee and 
their mother had made their request for the two pre-eminent 
seats in the new kingdom. Jesus in charity attributes their 
request to their ignorance, and then asks, Were they able to 
drink His cup and bear His baptism ? And they said they 
were able. The question and the answer are alike significant. 
The question shows that His spirit was already foretasting 
the passion. We see that while they wrangled and schemed 
as to who should be pre-eminent, He was feeling the awful 
solitude of His sorrow, the suffering that was His alone to 
know and to bear. Their answer illustrates, more than any 
other utterance recorded in the Gospels, the ignorance which 

1 Teaching of Jesus, vol. ii. pp. 227-234. 

2 Neutest. Theologie,i. 153. 



406 CONTRAST BETWEEN THE KINGS 

was the root of the alienation in which the disciples then 
lived. It expressed a tragic temerity, the courage of the 
childish or the drunken, who use words but do not know 
what they mean. If John ever recalled this moment, and 
looked at it through the memories of the passion, he must 
have experienced shame and humiliation of a kind which it 
is good even for saints to feel. But though it suggests to us 
the audacity of the child which now overwhelms and now 
amuses the man, what it must have signified to Jesus was the 
distance between His mind and theirs, the absence from their 
consciousness of what were then the most patent facts and 
potent factors in His own. So He gently calls to Him the 
disappointed two and the angry ten, though in the ten the 
very thoughts were active that had moved the two ; and 
proceeded once more to explain His kingdom in its 
antithesis to man's. They had construed His kingdom 
through man's instead of through Himself, and so had been 
seeking parallels where they ought to have found contrasts. 
And_ these contrasts He indicates rather than develops, 
(i.) The fundamental difference was in the persons who 
exercised kinghood, and therefore in the kinghood they 
exercised. In man's kingdom lordship is founded upon 
conquest, authority is based upon might, and so the great 
are the strong who compel the obedience of the weak ; 
but in Christ's the note of eminence is service, " the chiefest 
of all is the servant of all." This, however, requires the 
rarest qualities : for service of all without moral elevation 
degrades both him who gives and him who takes. Humility 
without magnanimity is meanness ; the humbleness that 
glories in being down invites the contempt of all honourable 
men, for it can neither climb up itself, nor lift up the fallen, 
nor help up the struggling. The service must therefore here 
be interpreted through the ideal Servant, " the Son of man." 
" Lordship " of the heroic order is not a difficult thing to 
attain, for men of marked moral inferiority have attained it : 






THE KINGDOMS, THEIR MEANS AND ENDS 40? 

Alexander, who was a youth of ungoverned passions ; Caesar, 
who was a statesman more astute than scrupulous ; Napoleon, 
who was but colossal obstinacy, loveless and athirst for blood. 
But the pre-eminence that comes of being " the servant of 
all " only Jesus has attained, and it is a pre-eminence which 
has outlasted all dynasties, because based on qualities that 
have ministered to all that was best, highest, and most 
universal in man. (ii.) Correspondent to this contrast in 
the authorities of the two kingdoms, is the difference in their 
ends. The "lord" governs as a ruler, persons to him are 
nothing, order and law are all in all. The violated law must 
be vindicated, the man who breaks it must be broken. But 
the " minister " serves as a saviour ; persons to him are 
everything ; law and order are agencies for the creation of 
happy persons and the common weal. The law which 
lordship enjoins is in its ultimate analysis force, and is, 
when violated, vindicated by the strength it commands ; 
but the end or law which the ministry obeys is benevolence, 
or in its ultimate analysis love, and it is vindicated only 
when it can, by the creation of a happy harmony between 
the person and his conditions, overcome misery and its 
causes. The creative energy in this case is moral, not, as in 
the other, physical ; and the created state is beatitude, or 
personal happiness within a happy state, (iii.) The contrast 
of authorities and ends implies therefore a correlative con- 
trast of means. The " lord " prevails by his power to inflict 
suffering, the " minister " by his power to save from it ; but 
the saving is a process of infinite painfulness, while the 
infliction is easy to him who has the adequate strength. 
The " lord " has only so to marshal his forces as to work 
his will, but the " minister " has to seek the person he would 
save, bear him in his own soul, quicken the dead energies 
of good within him by the streams of his own life, burn out 
the evil of the old manhood by the fire of consuming love. 
The final act, therefore, of the King whose kinghood is a 



408 DEATH FREE, NOT COMPULSORY 

ministry, is the sacrifice of Himself, giving " His life as a 
ransom for many." 

3. From this analysis of the words of Jesus, several posi- 
tions seem to follow, and these we may illustrate, not only 
from the Synoptists, but from John, which is here full of 
elucidatory material. 

(a) There is a distinct change in the point of view from 
which the death is regarded. Before it was represented as 
inflicted, the Son of man was to suffer death at the hands 
of the " elders and chief priests " ; here He lays down His 
life, spontaneously submits to death. The entrance of this 
voluntary element modifies the whole conception, changes 
the_, death from a martyrdom to a sacrifice. The martyr is 
not a willing sufferer, he is the victim of superior force. He 
dies because others so will. He might be able to purchase 
a pardon by recantation, did his conscience allow him to re- 
cant ; but conscience is not the cause of this death, only a 
condition for the action of those who inflict it. He does not 
choose death ; death, as it were, chooses him. But sacrifice 
is possible only where there is perfect freedom — where a man 
surrenders what he has both the right and the power to with- 
hold. Now Jesus here speaks of His act as a free act ; He 
came, not simply to suffer at the hands of violent men, but to 
do a certain thing — " give his life." The terms that describe 
the ministry and the death are co-ordinate, freedom enters in 
the same measure into both ; as He came to minister He 
came to give His life, the spontaneity in both cases being 
equal and identical. 

he two points of view — the earlier and the later — are not 
inconsistent, but rather complementary. In John the spon- 
taneity is more emphasized than in the Synoptists. His life 
no man takes from Him, He lays it down of Himself. 1 But 
the same Gospel emphasizes more than any of the others the 



ITS MOTIVE IS LOVE 409 

malignant activity of the Jews in compassing His death. 1 
Their action was necessary to its form, but His Spirit deter- 
mined its essence. The significance it had for history came 
from the framework into which it was woven ; but its value to 
God and man proceeded from the spontaneity with which it 
was undertaken and endured. In the freedom, therefore, which 
He now emphasized, Jesus lifted His death from an event in 
the history of Israel to an event in the history of Spirit ; 
and at the same time changed it from a martyrdom into 
a sacrifice, i.e. from a fate which He suffered to a work which 
He achieved. 

(/3) But beside this change from the conception of His per- 
son as a passive to that of it as an active factor in His death, 
stands another : the expression of the principle that governs 
His action. The sacrifice is not unmotived ; it is in order 
to service, an act born of benevolence. John here supplies 
an interpretative verse : " Greater love hath no man than 
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." 2 And 
there is a still higher synthesis. What is done in obedience 
to love is done in obedience to God. And so the same act 
which appears as love to man appears as duty to His Father, 
doing His will or obeying His commandments. 3 The volun- 
tary act thus turns into the very end of His existence, the 
cause why He came into the world. 4 And He is therefore 
the person whose function it is as the way to lead to the 
Father, as the truth to show the Father, as the life to 
generate, enlarge, and perpetuate on earth the Spirit which 
is of God. 5 The death thus ceases to be an incident in the 
petty and distressful history of a small people. It assumes a 
universal significance, is taken into the purpose of God, and 
becomes the means for the realization of the divine ends. 

(7) The ends to which the death is a means are variously 
represented. In the synoptic passage the end stands in 

1 v. 18 ; vii. 19, 30 ; viii. 37-40 ; x. 31-32 ; xi. 50. 2 xv. 13. 

3 x. 18 ; xiv. 31. 4 xviii. yj ; xix. 11. 5 xiv. 6. 



410 THE DEATH REDEEMS 

antithesis to that of the ethnic kingdoms, i.e. it is a state 
not of bondage but of ordered freedom, in a realm where 
the highest in honour and in office are the most efficient 
in service. This is in harmony with the Johannine word, 
" the truth shall make you free." x But the opposite of 
freedom is bondage, and in each case the state is in nature 
correspondent to its cause. " Where the Spirit of the Lord 
is there is liberty " ; but " whosoever committeth sin is the 
bondservant of sin." 2 The sin which man serves may be 
incorporated in many forms : the world, 3 which is sin 
generalized ; the devil, 4 which is sin personalized ; the 
wolves that harass and devour the flock, 5 which is sin 
symbolized. These are but aspects of one thing : sin is 
each, and sin is all ; but His death is the means by which 
God effects deliverance from each and all. By it the world 
is overcome, 6 the devil is judged, 7 and the sheep are saved. 8 
Now there is no term that could better express the means 
that effects these ends than Kvrpov, i.e. where the end is 
redemption, emancipation, deliverance from the dark powers 
which hold man in bondage, the means are most correctly 
denoted a " ransom." It is evident that Jesus is thinking 
of the fitness and efficacy of His death as a method of 
accomplishing a given purpose, and this determines the word 
He chooses. He does not think of buying off man either 
from the world or the devil, or of paying a debt to God, or 
of making satisfaction to law ; He simply thinks of man as 
enslaved, and by His death rescued from slavery. To require 
that every element in a figurative word be found again in the 
reality it denotes, is not exegesis but pedantry — the same 
sort of pedantry that would find in the parable of the Prodi- 
gal Son a complete and exhaustive picture of the relations of 
God and man. 

1 John viii. 32. 2 2 Cor. iii. 17 ; John viii. 34. 

3 John xv. 18, 19. 4 viii. 44. 5 x. 12. 

6 xvi. 33. 7 xvi. 11 ; xiv. 30. 8 x. 14, 15. 



SUFFERED IN ROOM OF MANY 411 

(S) The death is " for many." The " many " is to be taken 
as = multitude, mass. We cannot think that " the Son of 
man " and the " many " stand in accidental juxtaposition. 
The one term denotes a person who stands related to col- 
lective mankind ; the other term denotes those to whom He 
is related as the " multitude," the " many," not as opposed to 
the few, but as distinguished from " the One." The One has 
the distinction of the unique : He stands alone, and does what 
He alone can do. Of the " many " no one " can by any 
means redeem his brother nor give to God a ransom for 
him " ; 1 but " the One " can do what is impossible to all or 
any of the " many." His pre-eminence, therefore, is the 
secret of His worth ; He does what is possible to no other, 
for He transcends all others, and His personality equals as it 
were the personality of collective man. Hence He is able to 
" give Himself a ransom for many." 

(e) " For many :" avrl ttoX\.cov = " in room of many." His 
death is not a common death, and Jesus does not here con- 
ceive it simply as suffered " for conscience' sake," but as " for 
many." In it He endures the tragedy of His pre-eminence. 
Though His grace concedes to those who follow Him fellow- 
ship in His sufferings, yet in the article and moment of 
Sacrifice He is without a fellow. It is " a cup " which He 
alone can drink ; " a baptism " which none can share. And 
it is so because He stands where no one can stand beside 
Him, in a death which is " a ransom for many." 

§ II. How Jerusalem helps to define the Idea 

The ministry in Jerusalem is the supreme moment in the 
history of Jesus, and we have therefore to inquire whether 
it reveals, and, if so, in what degree it defines, His idea as 
to His death. We must keep clearly in view the positive 
features in the situation : He comes to the Holy City, the 

1 Ps. xlix. 7. 



412 THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM 

heart of the religion, the home of the temple, the throne of 
the priesthood, the one place where sacrifices acceptable to 
God could be offered. And He comes consciously as the 
Christ, for the prophet could not perish out of Jerusalem. 1 
And so everything He was to do and suffer was stamped 
by Him and for Himself with a distinct Messianic character. 

I. The triumphal entry can hardly be regarded as an 
accidental or even spontaneous outburst of popular enthu- 
siasm. The Synoptists are agreed in ascribing the initiative 
to Jesus ; He sends for the ass and the ass's colt in order that 
He may fitly enter the Holy City/ and though John is less 
detailed he is almost as explicit. 3 The disciples read the 
command as a public assertion of His claim to Messianic 
dignity, and proceed to inspire the multitude with their 
belief. And so Jesus is welcomed as the King come to claim 
His own by a jubilant people, crying, " Hosanna to the Son 
of David ! " He does not rebuke their joy, or, as He had 
once done, 4 enjoin silence as to His being the Christ, but 
accepts their homage as His rightful due. Hence when the 
Pharisees said, " Master, rebuke Thy disciples," He answered 
that, were they to be silent, the very stones would cry out. 5 
He thus endorses and vindicates their recognition. But He 
knows that while the people are trustful and waiting to be 
led, the rulers are suspicious and watching to crush the 
leader and — to fulfil His prophecy. For to subtle rulers 
nothing is so easy as to use a simple people as they will. 

But for His judgment on these public events we must turn 
to words spoken in the intimacy of His immediate circle. 
On the morrow, as He returns to the city, He speaks the 
parable of the barren fig tree. 6 It has a double moral, one 
pointed at the Jews, another at the disciples. The first tells 

1 Luke xiii. 23- 

2 Matt. xii. I ff. ; Mark xi. I ff. ; Luke xix. 29 ff. 

3 John xii. 14. 4 Matt. xvi. 20. 

5 Luke xix. 40. 6 Matt. xxi. 18-22. 



IS THE KING COMING TO HIS OWN 413 

how in the season of fruition He came to Israel, and instead 
of fruit " found nothing but leaves." And what was the good 
of the fruitless tree save to be bidden "to wither away"? 
The scribes, who ought to have been the eyes of the people, 
saw not the time of their visitation, saw only that their own 
custody of the parchment which held the oracles of God was 
threatened ; and so they made the great refusal. The chief 
priests, who ought to have been the conscience of Israel, had 
no conscience toward God but only to themselves ; and so 
they could think of nothing but the happiest expedient for 
effecting His death. So read, the parable is a piece of severe 
prophetic satire. The second moral told the disciples to have 
faith ; with it they could accomplish anything, without it 
nothing at all. They were to be the antithesis to the rulers, 
and exemplify not a faithlessness which the world overcomes, 
but the faith which overcomes the world. The two combined 
show the twofold attitude of Jesus, on the one hand to the 
men who were to erect the cross, on the other to the men 
who were to preach in His name to all nations. What is 
significant is the place and function which the parable 
assigns to Himself: to fail to receive Him is fundamental 
failure ; to believe in Him is to be qualified to effect the 
removal of mountains. 

What immediately followed the entry must also be noted. 
Jesus went straight to the temple, where, Mark significantly 
says, " He looked round upon all things," 1 and, returning on 
the morrow, " He cast out all them that bought and sold in 
the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, 
and the seats of them that sold doves." 2 This incident has 
been very variously judged : it has been regarded as an out- 
break of passion, as a lawless act, as even an act of rebellion 
and revolution ; as a desperate attempt to precipitate a con- 
flict, and by a sort of surprise attack save Himself from defeat 

1 Mark xi. 11. 2 xi. 15 ; Matt. xxi. 12, 13. 



414 THE LORD OF THE TEMPLE 

by the priests and rulers. 1 These seem to us shallow views. 
We could not feel as if Jesus became sinful simply because 
He was angry ; nay, the more sinless we think Him to be the 
more do we conceive indignation and resentment as natural 
and even necessary to Him. There are acts and states that 
ought to provoke anger, and not to feel it would argue a 
singularly poor and obtuse moral nature, without any power 
of recoil from the offensive and reprehensible. And from 
what He saw in the temple Jesus did well to be angry 
though it was anger without passion. Matthew 2 finely indi- 
cates this by two things, " the blind and the lame " — the two 
most timid classes — came to Him to be healed ; and the 
children, who are ever sensitive to passion and instinctively 
shrink from hate, were attracted to Him and sang in His 
praise ; i.e. the anger which was terrible to the guilty seemed 
tenderness to the innocent. And so the chief priests and 
scribes said, in suspicion and alarm, " Hearest Thou what 
these say?" But He justified the children thus: "Yea, did 
ye never read, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings 
Thou hast perfected praise ? " And His own action, how 
does He justify it ? By comparing the ideal with the actual 
temple : the ideal was to be a House of Prayer for all 
nations, but the actual had been made a den of robbers, 
i.e. they had narrowed it, and had prostituted the pure 
house of God to their own sordid uses. And He claimed 
the right to raise up the fallen ideal and to open the door 
wide to the pure in heart, who could see God, but could 
not trade in the holy place. 

He thus, in effect, said that as they had failed to under- 
stand prophecy, they had failed to realize worship. The 
counterpart of the dumb oracle was the defiled altar. And 

1 Keim, Jesus of Nasara, vol. v. pp. 118-23, for example, speaks about 
" His uncurbed anger," " His passion for rule and revolution," and de- 
scribes His action as the " Nothakt eines Untergehenden." 

2 Matt. xxi. 14-16. 






IS GREATER THAN THE TEMPLE 415 

so He affirmed His right to govern the house of God, to 
declare invalid the authority of the men who claimed to 
stand in the Aaronic succession and to sit in Moses' seat, to 
abolish the old and institute a new order, and to introduce 
the hour when the true worshipper was to " worship the 
Father in spirit and in truth." But in order to see the 
full meaning of the act, we must turn to a saying found 
elsewhere. At the trial two false witnesses appear and 
testify : " This man said, I am able to destroy the temple 
of God, and to build it in three days," x and the words were 
repeated by the mockers at the cross. 3 The saying, which 
was truly told, but falsely interpreted, evidently belongs 
here, and means that He had conceived Himself as the 
spiritual reality of which the temple was the material 
counterpart. What it was in symbol He was in truth — the 
medium for the reconciliation of man and God. In Galilee 
His controversy had been with the Pharisees touching tradi- 
tion and the law, here it was with the priests touching 
worship and the temple ; but the same idea lies behind 
both — His transcendence of the system which the Jew 
regarded as absolute and final : the Son of Man is greater 
than the temple, 3 and the Lord of the Law; 4 both are from 
Him, through Him, and for Him. In the background of 
His mind, regulating His speech and action, is the thought 
of the ideal temple, which was profaned in the profanation 
of the actual, and as the pure Sacrifice He purged the place 
where sacrifices were impurely offered. 

2. But it is still more in the teaching peculiar to the 
Jerusalem period that His idea is defined. It falls into 
two divisions, which we may call the exoteric and the 
esoteric. 

(a) In the exoteric, or outer, there is a new note ; His words 
are graver, sterner, much concerned with His death, and the 

1 Matt. xxvi. 61 ; cf. John ii. 19. 2 Matt. xxvi. 40. 

3 Matt. xii. 6. * Mark ii. 28. 



416 THE PARABLES SPOKEN IN JERUSALEM 

part in it the rulers were to play. Ideas and principles also 
appear, different from any He had expressed while He lived 
in Galilee, (i.) There is the parable of the husbandmen, who 
first beat and kill and stone the servants, and finally slay the 
son that they may seize on his inheritance. 1 What is this 
but a picture of the scene which was passing before His 
eyes and theirs? (ii.) There is His interpretation of the 
stone which the builders rejected, but which yet became 
the chief stone of the corner. 2 The builders are the rulers; 
He Himself is the stone, hastily set aside, but so terrible 
that it breaks whoever falls on it, and grinds to powder 
the man on whom it falls. No words could more clearly 
forecast their respective parts in the immediate future and 
in the subsequent history, (iii.) There is the parable of the 
Marriage Supper, 3 — full of the tragedy of the moment, — the 
bidden guests scornfully refusing to come, the servants 
spitefully entreated, even slain, though the slayers are 
themselves soon to be slain, and their city burned up, 
while the wedding is to be furnished with fitter guests. 
The meaning is obvious : He is the King's Son, now is 
the festival of the marriage, and the rulers, who in spite of 
their proud claims are yet only guests in the House, are 
rejected of God for the rejection of His Son. (iv.) There 
is the attitude of Jerusalem to Him and His to her. He 
has a marvellous vision ; 4 on the one hand the city is as 
it were personalized, and stands pictured as a colossal per- 
secutor, inheritor of the guilt of all past martyrdoms, and 
so charged with all the righteous blood which has from the 
days of Abel been shed upon the earth ; and on the other 
hand He stands as Maker and Leader of martyrs, a colossal 
Person in whose veins flows all the blood of all the righteous ; 
and by whose will the new prophets are fitly to be sent to 
deliver their testimony and endure the cross ; i.e. He con- 

1 Matt. xxi. 33-41 ; Mark xii. 1-9 ; Luke xx. 9-16. 

2 Matt. xxi. 42-44. 3 Matt. xxii. 2-10. 4 Matt, xxiii. 34-39. 



EXPLAIN THE NATURE OF HIS DEATH 417 

ceives the hour to be at hand when acts are to be done 
which will epitomize and embody all the martyrdoms of 
all the holy who have ever lived. But He who sees Himself 
and His thus suffer at her hands, is the very One whose 
mission and passion it was to save and shelter her. (v.) In 
the most authentic and sublime of the Apocalyptic discourses 
He affirms what we may call the vicarious principle. The 
good or ill of His people is His ; they are one with Him 
and He with them. The smallest beneficence to the least 
of His brethren is done to Him ; the good refused to them 
is denied to Him. 1 And, we may add, this idea implies its 
converse : if their sufferings are His, His are theirs ; what 
He endures and what He achieves, man achieves and en- 
dures. 

We can hardly misread the significance of these passages. 
They bear witness to this : that the moment when He 
foresees His death most clearly He conceives His person 
most highly ; that He regards this death as a calamity 
to those who reject, an infinite good to those who accept, 
Him ; that those who compass it participate in what may 
be termed a universal crime, which shall work their 
disaster while constituting His opportunity to effect ever- 
lasting good. The principle which explains these things 
is His complete identification with all the righteousness of 
time, or the unity in Him of the being of all the good 
who are hated of all the evil. 

(/3) But these are more or less external views, con- 
ditioned by the antithesis under which they are developed ; 
for His more inward mind we must turn to His words 
to the disciples. What this mind was is evident from 
the incident in the house of Simon, the leper. 2 The 
conflict in the city and with the rulers is over ; and He 
can speak to His own quietly and without controversy 
concerning the secret things of His own soul. As they 
1 Matt. xxv. 35-40, 42-45. 2 Matt. xxvi. 6-13 ; Mark xiv. 3-9. 

P.C.R. 27 



4i8 ANOINTED FOR THE BURYING 

sit at meat a woman, bearing " an alabaster box of very 
precious ointment," steals softly up behind Him, and 
" pours it upon His head." What followed shows how 
little the disciples had learned, and how much of their 
old spirit still lived within them. " To what purpose is 
this waste ? " is their indignant question, while their 
sordid feeling is disguised as concern for the poor. But 
the reply of Jesus expresses His innermost thought : 
" She is come to anoint My body aforehand for the 
burying." His death fills His mind, and it is to be a death 
which will leave no chance for assuaging the grief of 
the living by the last tender ministries to the dead. And 
He rejoices to see His own acts of sacrifice reflected in 
the gracious act of the woman ; the love that surrenders 
life feels comforted by the kindred love which covers with 
grateful fragrance the body so soon to be lifeless. But 
there is an even finer touch, showing the faith that lived 
in the heart of disaster. Jesus, while He anticipates death, 
anticipates universal fame and everlasting remembrance. 
His gospel is to be preached " throughout the whole 
world," and the woman's act is to be everywhere "spoken 
of as a memorial for her." This consciousness of His 
universal and enduring import is a note of the sayings 
which belong to His last days, and stands indissolubly 
associated with His approaching death. His words are 
to abide for ever ; x His gospel is, like the temple of God, 
destined for " all peoples." And these things He speaks 
of as simply and confidently as He speaks of His death. 

§ III. The Significance of the Supper 

I. But the most solemn and significant of all His 
utterances concerning His death are the words spoken 
at the institution of the Supper. Their sacramental inter- 

1 Mark xiii. 31. 



WHAT DOES THE SUPPER MEAN? 419 

pretation lies indeed outside our present purpose ; so does 
the interesting question which has been recently raised, 
whether we owe the change of the Supper into a permanent 
sacrament to Jesus or to Paul, and whether the suggestive 
cause of the change was Jewish custom or Greek mysteries. 
This question requires a broader and more searching 
treatment than it has yet received. The later action of 
the mysteries, and the tendencies that created the mysteries, 
upon the ideas of the Supper, of the elements, the conditions, 
the effects, and the modes of observance, may be established 
by various lines of proof ; but we see no reason to doubt 
that the Supper had become a Christian custom before 
Christianity had felt the delicate yet subduing touch of 
the Hellenic spirit. This question, however, does not 
affect ours, which is simply, " What did Jesus mean by 
the words He used as to His own death at the institution 
of the Supper? " 

In the several narratives the formulae are not quite 
identical. As has been often remarked, there are two 
main versions — that of Paul 1 and Luke 2 on the one hand, 
and that of Matthew 3 and Mark 4 on the other ; but even 
the versions which are alike significantly differ from each 
other, and as significantly agree with a representative of 
the independent tradition. Thus the formula for the bread 
is simpler in Matthew (Adhere, cfxiyeTe' tovto eanv to aoifjbd 
fiov), and Mark (who omits (pdyere), but more detailed in 
Paul (tovto fjbov iaTiv to awjxa to inrep v/jlwV tovto TrotelTe 
et? tt)v ifirju dvci/xvTjcnu), and, according to the received text, 
most detailed in Luke (tovto Io-tiv to o-cojAa /j,ov to vwep 
vficov Si.86fMevov' tovto 7roi€iT€ ei? Tr)V €fjbr]v dvdfivrjacv) . The 
variations affect both the theological and the sacramental 

1 1 Cor. xi. 24-25. 

2 xxii. 19-20. But as to the text here see Westcott and Hort, Intro- 
anction, §§ 240, 241, and Notes on Select Readings, pp. 63, 64. Cf. Zahn, 
Einleitmig, ii. pp. 357-359. 3 xxvi. 26-28. 4 xiv. 22-24. 



420 DIFFERENCES OF FORMULAE 

idea, the former in to virep vfiwv, the latter in tovto 7rot,elre 
et? ttjv i/^rjv dvdfMvqatv. In the formula for the wine, the 
cross agreements and differences are still more instructive. 
Mark is simplest : tovto io-Tiv to ai/ad p,ov tt)<; 8ta0r)Kr)<; to 
ifc%vvv6fievov inrep nroXKwv. Matthew changes virep into trepi, 
and adds eU cicfieaiv d/MapTicav. Paul says : tovto to iroT^piov 
r) kclivt) Biddr/icr) eaTiv iv tc3 i/x<£ dlp,a,Ti : while Luke com- 
bines Matthew and Mark with Paul, thus : tovto to "iroTr\piov 
7] Kaivij hiadrjicr) ev tc3 aifiaTi fxov, to virep VfJLWV eK.yyvvbp,evov. 
These variations are easily explicable, and show, so far 
as the sacramental idea is concerned, that the validity of 
the ordinance did not depend on any uniformity in the 
formula used ; for words so freely altered could not be 
conceived to possess some mystic or magic potency capable 
of effecting a miraculous change in the elements. As 
concerns the theological idea, the difference in the terms 
represents no contradiction or radical divergence in the 
thought. Paul and Luke say, " the new covenant in My 
blood" — i.e. the covenant which stood in the blood, or 
had therein the condition of its being. Matthew and Mark 
say, " this is the blood of the covenant " — i.e. the blood 
which gives it being and character, which is its seal and 
sanction. They agree in their idea of the covenant, though 
Paul and Luke think of it as "the new" in contrast to 
" the old," while Matthew and Mark think of it, absolutely, 
as sole and complete. Paul says nothing as to the persons 
for whom the blood has been shed ; Luke says, " for you " ; 
Matthew and Mark, " for many." But the difference here is 
formal. Paul means what the others say, while the " you " 
is only the personalized and present "many," the "many" 
the enlarged and collective "you." Matthew alone definitely 
expresses the purpose for which the blood was shed — 
" unto the remission of sins " ; but this only made explicit 
the idea contained in the virep vfiwv and the virep or even 
the irepl woXkdv : for what other idea could the conscious- 



SAMENESS OF MEANING 421 

ness of the disciples supply save that the blood shed " for 
them," or " in reference to many," was shed " in order to 
remission of sins " ? The phrasing varies ; the language 
is here less, there more, explicit, but the thought is through- 
out one and the same. 

2. What, then, did the words which our authorities 
thus render mean on the lips of Jesus ? We cannot be 
wrong, considering where it stands, in regarding this as 
the weightiest, most precise, and defining expression which 
He has yet used concerning His death. The form under 
which He first conceived it was as an integral part of His 
work as Messiah, yet as a fate He endures or suffers at 
the hands of the elders and chief priests. The next form 
under which He conceived it was as the spontaneous surrender 
of Himself "as a ransom for many." But here these two 
forms coalesce in a third, which is at once their synthesis 
and completion. His death has (a) at once an historical 
and an ideal, a retrospective and a prospective significance ; 
it ends one covenant and establishes another ; (/3) it has 
an absolute worth irrespective of the form it may assume 
or the means by which it may be effected, for though 
inflicted by men, it is endured on behalf of man ; and (7) 
its express purpose is to create a new, an emancipated 
people of God. 

(a) But in order that these ideas may be understood 
they must be interpreted through His experience, the 
facts and factors that had shaped and were shaping His 
thought. The covenant which He established stands as 
"the new" in explicit antithesis to the "old," and finds 
its constitutive condition and characteristic in " His blood." 
He dies at the hands of the old covenant, but in so dying 
He creates the new. This makes His death the concrete 
expression of the antithesis of the covenants, and at the 
same time represents the inmost fact of His own conscious 
experience. While possessed by the feeling of radical 



422 THE JUDGE JUDGES HIMSELF 

unity with His people, He was an alien to the actual 
system under which they lived. He consciously incor- 
porated their most distinctive religious ideas, but He was 
as consciously in conflict with the men who claimed to 
be the official representatives and only authorized ministers 
of the old religion. The degree in which He embodied 
those ideas was the measure of His antagonism to the 
men, and theirs to Him. To be the Christ of prophecy 
was to be the Crucified of Judaism. This was the tragedy 
of the situation : the Jew had existed in order that he might 
produce the Christ, but once He was there the Jew did not 
know Him, would not love Him, had no room for Him, 
could do nothing with Him save compass His death. The 
words of Caiaphas 1 are but the official version of what 
Jesus Himself had foreseen and so often foretold. His 
reading of the religion was the direct contradiction of 
theirs ; both could not live together, and the only way in 
which they could effectually contradict His contradiction 
was by His death. But at this point, as to what was to 
be accomplished by His death, He and they radically 
differed ; they thought that by the cross He was to die 
and they were to live, but He believed that they were 
through His death not to live, but to die. This idea fills 
His later teaching ; it is the moral, not simply of the 
Apocalyptic discourses, but of the parables already noticed, 2 
of His words to the women of Jerusalem, 3 and of His 
lamentation over the city. 4 It was the supreme Nemesis 
of history. What fate save death could happen to the 
system whose reward to its most righteous Son was the 
cross ? 

(/3) But this is an indirect, and, as it were, negative result 
of His death ; the direct and positive is the new covenant 
which is established in His blood. We need not concern 

1 John xi. 50. 2 Ante, pp. 418-419. 3 Luke xxiii. 28-31. 

4 Matt, xxiii. 38 ; Luke xix. 43, 44. 



JESUS EATS THE PASSOVER 423 

ourselves with the idea of " covenant " ; enough to say, it is 
here held to denote a gracious relation on God's part ex- 
pressed in a new revelation for the faith and obedience of 
man. But what does very specially concern us is what Jesus 
says as to His blood. It must be explained through the 
moment and all its circumstances. He had strongly desired 
ta eat the Passover with His disciples before He suffered, 1 
and He had sent Peter and John beforehand to prepare it. 2 
Now this means that its associations were vivid both in His 
mind and in theirs, and through these associations His words 
must be construed. The feast was the most domestic of all 
the feasts in Israel ; in it the father was the priest, the home 
was the temple. The lamb was not the symbol of any sacer- 
dotal function, but of family and racial unity, especially in 
the eye and purpose of God. Its blood was not shed to 
propitiate a vengeful Deity, and induce Him to pass kindly 
over the family for whom it had been slain and the house 
where it was being eaten, but rather to mark them as God's 
own ; in other words, the paschal sacrifice did not make Him 
gracious, but found Him gracious, and confessed that those 
who offered it believed themselves to be the heirs of His 
grace. It was the seal of a mercy which had been shown 
and was now claimed, not the purchase of a mercy which 
was withheld and must be bought. It signified, too, that 
since the people were God's, they could not continue slaves, 
but must be emancipated and live as became the free, 
obedient to the Sovereign whose supremacy could brook no 
rival authority. It was the symbol, therefore, of unity, all 
the families who sacrificed constituted a single people ; Israel 
knew only one God, God knew only one Israel. Jesus trans- 
lated these associations from the traditions which acted as 
the fetters of the past into the ideals which were to govern 
the future. He manifestly conceived Himself as the sacri- 
ficial lamb, for only so can we find any meaning in the 
1 Luke xxii. 15. 2 Luke xxii. 8. 



424 UNITY OF THE ONE AND THE MANY 

reference to His blood ; and the figure was beautiful enough 
to apply even to Him. It was the symbol of innocence, 
meekness, gentleness, of one who was led to the slaughter, 
and was dumb under the hand of the shearer ; but it did 
not speak of a victim whose blood was shed to appease a 
vindictive sovereign. On the contrary, the blood told of 
divine grace and denoted a member of the family of God, a 
man spared, emancipated, introduced into all the liberties 
and endowed with all the privileges of Divine sonship. 

(7) So far we have been concerned with the relation of 
the blood to the covenant, but we are now met by another 
question : In what sense could it be said to be shed " for 
you " or " for many " ? We have seen that He spoke of acts 
done to the least and the neediest of men as if they were 
done to Himself; but the precise parallel of this is that the 
acts He does may be conceived as done by man ; in other 
words, He is so the centre or keystone of family or racial 
unity that in a perfectly real sense His act is universal, even 
while a person performs it. His position is twofold : He 
conceives Himself as the Lamb sacrificed in order to mark 
and seal the people of God, i.e. establish His covenant ; but 
He also at the same moment sits in the seat of the host or 
father, who sums up in himself the household, acts and 
speaks as their sole and responsible head. As the one He 
distributes the elements which symbolize the sacrifice ; as the 
other He is the sacrifice which the elements symbolize. The 
ideas proper to these quite distinct relations, blend both in 
His consciousness and in that of the disciples. According 
to the one He is offered for the many ; according to the 
other His act is their act, in Him they live impersonated. 
Hence His suffering at the hands of man is theirs, and theirs 
also is His surrender to the will of God. The outer letter 
which is abolished by His death, ceases to have dominion 
over them ; the inner obedience which is accomplished by 
His spirit, becomes a fact of their history, and a factor of their 



DEATH AS IDEA AND AS EXPERIENCE 425 

new experience. In other words, by being made a curse for 
us He redeems us from the curse of the law ; and by means 
of the new spirit of life which is in Him, He sets us free from 
the law of sin and death. And so Paul sums up the inner- 
most meaning of His words when he said : "Christ is the end 
of the law for righteousness to every one who believeth." * 

§ IV. Gethsemane and the Cross 

1. So far we have been occupied with Jesus' prophetic 
interpretation of His death, but when He comes face to face 
with it and sits in its shadow, we have to note a correspondent 
and characteristic change in His mental attitude. From the 
idea of death He never shrinks ; He contemplates it calmly, 
speaks of it with the serene dignity of one who knew that 
the most tragic moment of His life was at once His own 
supreme choice and the real end of His being. But when He 
knows its mode and thinks of the agents it needed, His feel- 
ing changes, and His speech is charged now with admonition 
and judgment, now with pity and regret. This difference is 
recognized both by the Synoptists and by John. By the 
Synoptists He is shown as speaking of the positive fact and 
function of His death only when His mood is most exalted, 
or when He is most moved by love and pity, or when He 
feels least scorched by human hate and most moved by the 
clinging trust of His disciples. But when He confronts the 
men and sees the means by which it is to be accomplished, 
His spirit vibrates to another tone ; the men are the wicked 
husbandmen, or the foolish builders ; they are " blind guides," 
"hypocrites," who crucify the living prophets, and build the 
sepulchres of those long dead. The city they rule so moves 
His compassion that at the sight of it He weeps. The 
traitor is a man of so woeful a fate that he had better never 
have been born. And so while of death in relation to 

1 Rom. x. 4. 



426 JOY IN THE DEATH BEFORE HIM 

Himself He thinks and speaks with benignant grace, the 
thought of its manner begets in Him something akin to 
dismay. 

In John the difference is even more strongly accentuated. 
He speaks of His death in language that would on other 
lips suggest rapture. It was His own act, the thing He had 
come by command of the Father expressly to do. 1 It was 
the hour in which "the Son of Man should be glorified." 2 
By death He was " to be lifted up from the earth," and 
would " draw all men unto Himself." 3 But the sanctity of 
the death does not sanctify the instruments by which it is 
realized. On the contrary the traitor acts by inspiration of 
Satan. 4 The Jews are like their father the devil, who was " a 
murderer from the beginning," 5 and this was said because 
He knew that they "sought to kill Him." 6 

We have, then, even in the prophetic period these two 
very different, but not at all incompatible, elements in the 
consciousness of Jesus. His sacred joy or spiritual exalta- 
tion in the prospect of death, and His horror at the form 
in which, and the forces through which, it was to come to 
Him. But now we must advance a step further, and study 
His spirit as it suffers in the hands of those forces whose 
action He had foreseen. And here we shall have constant 
need to remember the distinction between experience and 
foresight ; for the evil the intellect watches is sweet when 
compared with the infinite bitterness of the evil which the 
soul touches and feels. What we have then to attempt to 
describe is the transition of the Saviour's mind from the 
objective contemplation of the death He was to die to His 
subjective experience of the powers by which it was to be 
accomplished. 

2. The incident which exhibits this transition is the scene 
in Gethsemane. Now, of all the events in the Saviour's life 

1 x. 18. 2 xii. 23-27. 3 xvii. 1, 33. 

4 xiii. 27. 5 viii. 44. 6 vii. 1. 



AGONY IN THE FACE OF DEATH 427 

this seems to me to demand the most reverent handling ; 
for it is, as it were, the very Holy of Holies, the inmost 
sanctuary of His sorrow, which ought to be entered only at 
those moments when thought has been purged from the 
pride and impurities of life. But the scholar is often more 
curious than reverent, though in sacred things the irreverent 
is near of kin to the blind ; and as it is so easy to be unfit 
to be an interpreter, few incidents have been more utterly 
misunderstood than this. It is not surprising that Celsus 
should have explained the scene as due to Christ's fear of 
death j 1 or that Julian should have pitied Him as a miserable 
mortal unable to bear His fate calmly ; 2 or that a modern 
pagan like Vanini on his way to the scaffold should have 
pointed to a crucifix, and said : " I Hi in extremis prae timore 
imbellis sudor : ego imperterritus morior." 3 Nor are we 
surprised that the older Rationalists should regard it as the 
effect of a purely physical cause — fear due to bodily exhaus- 
tion and indisposition ; 4 or that Baur should see in it only 
an event that enabled him to play the Synoptists off against 
John and John against the Synoptists ; 5 or that Strauss, hold- 
ing the narrative to be more poetical than historical, should 
have mythically decomposed it in his first Life, 6 and followed 
in his second Baur's antithetical criticism to its issue in a 
prosaic naturalism ; 7 or that Renan, true tc his Parisian 
sentimentality, should conceive it as a moment when human 
nature reawoke in Jesus, and He felt enfeebled, if not 
affrighted, at the vision before Him of the death which was 

1 Contra Cels., lib. ii., c. xxiv. 

2 Apud Theod. Mops., in Ev. Luca Com. Frag.; Pat. Gr., t. lxvi. 
p. 724. 

3 Grammondus, Hist. Gall. ab. ex. Hen. IV., lib. iii. pp. 211 seqq. ; 
cf. Brucker, Historia Pliilos., t. iv., pars 1 1, pp. 675-8. 

4 Paulus, Das Leben Jesu, ii. pp. 202-210. 

5 Untersuch. iiber die Kanon. Evang., pp. 198 ff., 207, 265 f. 

6 Life of Jesus (4th ed.), §§ 125, 126. 

7 New Life, % 87. 



428 PERPLEXES THE REASON 

to end all, and the vision behind of the clear springs of 
Galilee and the fair maidens who visited them. 1 But we are 
surprised that Keim should see in it the human dread of 
death holding Christ back from His destiny ; 2 that Schleier- 
macher should lose all sense of its sublime significance in a 
hypercritical analysis of the possible sources of its details ; 3 
or that Neander should see Him here asking, as a man, to be 
spared the sufferings that awaited Him. 4 But bad as these 
explanations are, some of those we owe to more orthodox 
theologians are worse. Steinmeyer thinks that Jesus here 
may have taken upon His shoulders the sin of the world in 
order that He might, vicariously, make atonement for it on 
the Cross. 5 Long before him Calvin had here seen Jesus 
as our substitute, burdened with our sins, bearing the wrath 
of God with the judgment-seat before His eyes. 6 More 
reasonable was Ambrose, who saw Jesus sorrowful not for 
His own, but for man's state : " Tristis erat, non pro sua 
passione, sed pro nostra dispersione." 7 But possibly even 
more reasonable was the elder Dumas when he represented 
the agony as a second temptation, in which the devil tried to 
drive Christ back from His work by three successive visions, 
the last and most terrible being the persecution by the 
Church of the heretics, their heresy being often their higher 
saintliness. These selections from a multitude of elaborately 
argued opinions, are enough to show how hard it has been 
to seize the real significance of this awful moment in the 
history of our Saviour's Passion. 

3. If we are to interpret the agony, we must assume 
the reality and the authenticity of the Synoptic narrative. 8 

1 Vie de Jesus, p. 378 (7th ed.). 2 Jesus of Nazara, vi. p. 12. 

3 Das Leben /esu, pp. 422-4. Cf. Essay on the Gospel of St. Luke, 
pp. 300-1. 

4 Life of Christ, § 280. 5 Leidensgesch, des Herm, pp. 62 fif. 

6 In Harm. Evang. Matt. xxvi. yj. 

7 Expos. Ev. sec. Lucam, lib. x. § 61. 

8 Matt. xxvi. 36-46 ; Mark xiv. 32-42 ; Luke xxii. 39, 40. 



YET IS LUCID TO THE SOUL 429 

Though John does not give it, yet the attitude and state of 
mind it expresses were not unknown to him. 1 Luke differs 
in certain details from Matthew and Mark — the angel which 
strengthens Him, the sweat " as it were great drops of blood 
falling down to the ground," and the omission of the thrice- 
repeated prayer; but the differences are mainly noticeable for 
this — Luke, by the angel and the sweat of blood, and Matthew 
and Mark, by the threefold resort to prayer, express the same 
thing — the intensity of the strain, the deadly nature of the 
struggle. Now, it is evident that the Evangelists did not 
regard the narrative as representing anything so common- 
place and even vulgar as the fear of death. They had told, 
with many a touch of unconscious truth, how the disciples 
had refused to see the approach of its inexorable front while 
He had looked upon it with serene and open face ; and, 
simple as they were, they could not have mistaken the 
meaning of so sudden a reversal of mental attitude. Not 
that horror at death in Jesus would have been either an 
unseemly or an inexplicable thing. Contempt of life is the 
obverse, indifference to death is the reverse of the same mind. 
The more excellent the good of life seems, the more terrible 
will appear its negation ; and it might well have been that the 
soul which most possessed the good, should have most loved 
life, and most have feared its darksome ending. But the 
feeling, though explicable in itself, will not fit into the history. 
The death so often anticipated, so solemnly sanctioned, so 
formally blessed, could not be thus met. The higher we 
place its significance for Jesus, the less can we construe it as 
the cause of His agony ; for this agony must stand in organic 
connexion with His expressed mind, not in violent contra- 
diction to it. If so, then it is evident that the antecedent of 
the agony was not the idea of death, but the feeling as to its 
means and agents. His death was to be for sin, but at the 
hands of sinners, yet of sinners disguised as " elders and 

1 John xii. 27. 



430 DEATH AS IDEA AND AS REALITY 

chief priests," as disciples and judges. In foresight the mode 
of death was subordinate to the idea, but in experience the 
idea tended to be lost in the emotions which the mode 
awakened. How this was the history tells. In Galilee the 
men who were to effect His death were mere names to Him ; 
in Jerusalem the names became men. They were the priests, 
who stood for all that the worship of God signified ; the 
elders, who were in symbol the people of God ; the magi- 
strates, who guarded freedom, enforced law, and typified 
right ; the disciples, who had heard and followed Him, and 

Lived in His mild and magnificent eye. 

Behind the actual persons He thus saw ideal figures stand ; 
and if the ideal signified what ought to have been, it was the 
actual which, by its inevitable working, determined His all 
too bitter experience. To see it stand in the holy place was 
bad enough, it was worse to feel that it stood there to oppose 
all that was of God in Himself. And worst of all was the 
discovery that evil had found a foothold and embodiment in 
the society He Himself had selected and trained. We must 
not overlook the influence which the conduct of Judas would 
exercise on the mind of the Master. Jesus as He entered 
the garden carried a double memory : the gracious dream of 
the Supper, and the lurid image of the traitor. From the very 
nature of the case, the more bitter would for the moment be 
the more potent feeling ; for where the soul is so susceptible 
and tense, the painful strikes more deeply than the agreeable. 
And Gethsemane represents the struggle of Jesus with the 
new problem which thus came before His imagination per- 
sonified in Judas and the priests, and which he had to solve 
in the very face, if not in the very article, of death. 

4. And what was this new problem ? Jesus was holy, and 
felt as only the sinless can the stain of sin burn like a living 
fire upon His soul. He had conceived Himself as a Redeemer 
by the sacrifice of Himself, as a Saviour by death. But now, 



EVIL IN THE HEART OF GOOD 431 

when He comes face to face with this death, what does He 
find ? That sin has taken occasion from His very grace to 
become more exceedingly sinful, to mix itself up with His 
sacrifice, penetrating and effacing it, transmuting it from a 
free and gracious act into a violent and necessitated death. 
His act of redemption becomes, so to say, the opportunity for 
sin to increase. The thing He most hates seems to become 
a partner with Him in the work He most loves, contributing 
to its climax and consummation. Or if not so conceived, 
it must be conceived under a still more dreadful form, as 
forcing itself into His way, taking possession of His work, 
turning it into " a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence," 
a means of creating sinners while it had been intended to 
save from sin. And there was an even more intolerable 
element in the situation : the men who were combining to 
effect this death were persons He was dying to save, and 
by their action they were making the saving a matter more 
infinitely hard, more vastly improbable, and changing the 
efficient cause of salvation into a sufficient reason for judg- 
ment. 

Is it possible to exaggerate the suffering which such a 
problem at such a moment must have caused ? He could 
not turn back without being defeated by His horror of this 
transcendent evil, and He could not go forward without 
feeling that He was almost compelling it to be. And so 
first seclusion, then solitude, become to Him a necessity. 
The society that had made the Supper sacred He must 
forsake, for at it He had something to give which made 
Him happy, while it consoled and satisfied the disciples ; 
now He wanted to receive and could not, for they did not 
understand what to give and why He suffered. So he 
leaves them that he may pray alone, yet pauses, and turns 
to take Peter, James, and John, the three who seemed to 
know Him best and love Him most. But they are as 
irresponsive as the dumb soul which speaks no word the 



432 THE CONFLICT AND THE PASSION 

human ear can hear, because it has no ear which the human 
tongue can reach. So He turns to God in what we may 
almost describe as His despair. Thrice He prays in an 
agony of spirit which becomes an agony of body ; but even 
in the midst of the anguish that will not be controlled, He 
remains master of His will, compels it, even while all His 
nature seems to resist, to be not submissive but obedient, 
to accept not its own impulse, but God's wisdom as its law. 
The thing He would not do, is what His own nature abhors ; 
but the thing He will do because He must, is what God 
requires. He feels the position as it lives in the place and 
the moment, but God sees the universal and the eternal 
issues within it ; and so in spite of the noble and justified 
resistance of the flesh, the spirit obeys the wisdom that 
cannot err. The conflict is over, and He goes to a death 
which is at one and the same moment the world's redemption 
and the world's crime. 

I feel the temerity and presumption in so thinking, and 
still more in thus writing, for I feel as if the intellect, in 
analytically handling the Passion, tends to become little 
else than profane. I may say, however, that the very last 
thing I could bring myself to do is to apply legal fictions 
or judicial processes to the mind and state of the Saviour 
in Gethsemane. Everything here seems to me superlatively 
real, in the last and highest degree actual. And the reality 
in this stage of the Passion concerns His relation not to the 
Father, but to destiny and death. From death as such He 
does not shrink, but from its mode and agencies, from death 
under the form and conditions which involve its authors in 
what appears inexpiable guilt, His whole nature recoils. 
And this recoil compels us to see that we must divide 
asunder His part and man's ; in what He contributes there 
is saving efficacy, in what man contributes there is a guilt 
which causes shame, and becomes a reproach to all mankind. 
And here one may find some small part of the reason why 



THE CROSS AND SENSE OF SIN 433 

His prayer for release could not be granted. The cross has 
in a perfectly real sense done more than any other agency 
to convince the world of sin ; one may say it has created 
in man, both as person and as race, the conscience for sin. 
It stands not simply as the symbol of the grace that saves, 
but of the wickedness that dared attempt to extinguish the 
grace. And another thing may be added. While He had 
to drink the cup, it would not be quite correct to say that 
His prayer was not answered. For He did not pray in vain. 
The author of Hebrews says, " He was heard for His godly 
fear." l Jesus died on the cross, but not of the cross. He 
suffered crucifixion, but He was not crucified. The will which 
triumphed in the conflict broke the heart which could not 
bear to endure death at the hands of sinners. And this 
brings us to the conclusion that the death which redeems 
was all the work of the Redeemer ; and not at all of the men 
who might sin against His grace but could not sin away His 
mercy, or deprive Him of the splendid privilege of giving 
Himself " a ransom for many." 

1 v. 9. 



P.C.R. 28 



Mors ad hominem pertinebat, resurrectio ad Filium hominis. — 

Augustine. 

Incarnatio Verbi est complementum et quies creationis ; nam in illo 
opere quiescit potentia in se ipsa. Deus uti in maximo atque ultimo 
compleniento operum in Christo quiescit. — NICHOLAS OF CuSA. 

Die leibliche Geburt Christi bedeutet allenthalben seine geistliche 
Geburt, vvie er in uns und wir in ihm geboren werden. — LUTHER. 

Nous disons que Dieu craint, que Dieu se courrouce, que Dieu aime, 
Immortalia mortali sermone notantes : 
ce sont toutes agitations et esmotions qui ne peuvent loger en Dieu, selon 
nostre forme ; ny nous, l'imaginer selon la sienne. C'est a Dieu seul de 
se cognoistre, et interpreter ses ouvrages ; et le faict en nostre langue 
improprement, pour s'avaller et descendre a nous, qui sommes a terre 
couchez. — Montaigne. 

Here was, therefore, an exemplary temple, the fair and lovely pattern 
of what we were each of us to be composed and formed unto : imitating 
us (for sweeter insinuation and allurement) in what was merely natural, 
and inviting us to imitate him in what was (in a communicable sort) 
supernatural and divine. — Howe. 

He took off those many superinduced rites, which God enjoined to the 
Jews, and reduced us to the natural religion ; that is, to such expres- 
sions of duty which all wise men and nations used ; save only, that he 
took away the rite of sacrificing beasts, because it was now determined in 
the great sacrifice of Himself, which sufficiently and eternally reconciled 
all the world to God. — Jeremy Taylor. 

Die Erscheinung des ersten Menschen constituirt zugleich das phy- 
sische Leben des menschlichen Geschlechts ; die Erscheinung des 
zweiten Adam constituirt fur dieselbe Natur das neue geistige Leben, 
welches sich durch geistige Befruchtung mittheilt und fortentwickelt. — 

SCHLEIERMACHER. 

Ce qui est hors de doute, quelque soit 1'avenir religieux de l'humanite, 
c'est que la place de Jesus y sera immense. II a e^e le fondateur du 
christianisme, et le christianisme reste le lit du grande fleuve religieux de 
l'humanite. — Renan. 



434 



PART II 

THE CREATION OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION BY THE 
INTERPRETATION OF THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

INTRODUCTORY 

THE questions discussed in the previous part may be 
stated thus : How did the Synoptists conceive and 
represent Jesus ? and, How did He conceive and interpret 
Himself ? These have been dealt with less as literary and 
exegetical than as historical questions ; i.e. the meaning 
of the Evangelists has been read through the history they 
made as well as through the histories they wrote. This 
does not mean that the definitions and dogmas of the later 
creeds have been interpreted into the words of Jesus and His 
biographers ; but that the men and their beliefs ought to be 
construed not simply through their antecedents and environ- 
ment, but also through the changes and events they occasioned. 
In other words, our endeavour has been to discover causes 
as well as to ascertain effects ; for the logic which compels 
us to seek a reasonable cause for nature will not allow us to 
be satisfied with a non-rational cause in history. The facts we 
have to interpret have proved themselves factors of order and 
progress ; and while they have to be explained as facts they 
must be interpreted as factors. 

As regards this inquiry, so far as it has proceeded, three 
things may here be noted : (a) The field of research has been 
as much as possible restricted to what it is the fashion to call 
the Ur- Marcus and the Logia, or the history which is common 



436 LIMITS OF THE DISCUSSION 

to all the Synoptists, and the collection of sayings which has 
been so largely used by two, Matthew and Luke. The dis- 
cussion has not infrequently, indeed, wandered beyond these 
sources, but rather for illustrative or confirmatory purposes 
than for such material as could in any degree affect the 
course and the validity of the argument. (/3) As a consequence 
of this emphasis on their common matter it has become 
evident that while the Synoptic Gospels are, as regards 
literary origin, later than the oldest Epistles, they show 
remarkably few signs of having been influenced by the 
Apostolical mind in either the history they narrate or the 
sayings they report. This is evident in minor matters like 
terms and incidents as well as in major matters like ideas and 
speeches. If we would test the truth of this statement, we 
have only to compare the large place which the Apocalyptic 
vision fills in the later discourses of Jesus with the small space 
it occupies in the earliest Apostolical literature. The special 
matter found in only one Gospel, like the parables peculiar 
to Luke, stand on a different footing. (7) The conception 
of Jesus in the history and in the sayings is a unity. He 
is the same person in both. His words do not contradict 
His acts nor His acts His words. The character explicated 
in the teaching is evolved in the life. This unity of the 
ideal and the real is most significant. Modern criticism has 
failed as signally as the old dogmatism to construct a co- 
herent image of the historical Jesus ; in its hands He has 
become after years of labour and effort ever less credible and 
less possible. The idea that satisfies a consciousness governed 
by a more or less conventional idea of nature, will almost 
certainly offend a consciousness governed by the idea of the 
living continuity of history. 

The questions to which we now pass are at once the 
converse and the logical sequents of those already discussed. 
What idea had the men who followed Jesus, the Apostles 
and the Apostolic writers, of His person ? How did this 



AND THE PROBLEM TO BE DISCUSSED 437 

idea come to be ? In what sense and by what process may 
it be said to have created the Christian religion ? And 
what were. the essential and constitutive elements in the 
interpretation ? These questions bring us directly face to 
face with the Apostolic literature, especially with those parts 
of it which represent distinct types of the idea and mark 
stages in its expression and determination. 

We have, then, three main problems to discuss : — 

I. The interpretation of Christ's Person, which was the 
source of the main ideas as to God and man that constituted 
the Christian faith. 

II. The genesis of the interpretation, or how the remarkable 
idea as to the person of Christ arose, and why it found 
acceptance ? 

III. The interpretation of Christ's death, which determined 
the nature and form of Christian worship. 



CHAPTER I 

THE PERSON AS INTERPRETED IN THE APOSTOLICAL 
LITERATURE 

IN the synoptic Gospels we have the record of a life dis- 
tinguished by many miraculous acts, but we have no 
explicit philosophy of the Person who performed the acts ; 
in the apostolical Epistles we have a doctrine of the Person, 
but no history of His life. In the former we have the re- 
presentation of a real individual who lived, suffered, and died, 
and who, as regards His character, words, and acts, may be 
criticized and appreciated like any other historical person ; in 
the latter we have this Person regarded sub specie ceternitatis, 
interpreted according to His place and function in universal 
history and as the central term in a theology or system of 
religious thought. The name of the uninterpreted person, the 
hero of the spontaneous biographies, is Jesus of Nazareth, but 
the name of the interpreted person, the Being who exists to 
thought and for it, is Christ ; and these two are as distinct 
yet as indissolubly related as the mathematical diagram on 
the blackboard and the mathematical truth in the mind, 
which is by the diagram made explicit and applied to the 
interpretation of nature. In other words, Jesus is a symbol 
which the Epistles explicate for human belief and apply to 
human experience, individual and collective. The local and 
transient supernaturalism of the Gospels becomes in their 
hands a supernaturalism universal and transcendental. But 

without the local the universal could not have been. 

438 



PAUL A WELL KNOWN MAN 439 

§ I. Paul and the Pauline Literature 

I. We have already recognized a very significant fact : 
the literature which defines and determines the doctrine of 
the Person is older than the literature which tells the story 
of the life. The oldest Pauline Epistle is divided by little 
more than twenty years from the death of Jesus ; and the 
latest by a still shorter interval from the Epistle to the 
Hebrews and the Apocalypse. Within a period which may 
be thus roughly defined the doctrine of the Person had been 
elaborated, and, in its main lines, fixed by minds which were 
at once varied in type and quite distinct in their tendencies. 
Nor does this fully state the case. The authorship of the 
Gospels is a pure matter of tradition or of critical inference. 
We do not know with any degree of certainty by whom, for 
whom, when or where they were written. But there is nothing 
more certain in ancient literature than the authorship of the 
more important of the Pauline Epistles ; and we may add 
that the author himself is better known to us than any 
other writer in the New Testament, or probably even than 
any other person in antiquity. There is nothing so perfectly 
autobiographical as the expression he has given to his 
thought ; or anything so unconsciously characteristic of the 
writer and descriptive of himself and his world as the literary 
forms he has employed and the allusions he has made. 
He has so written his thought as to write history ; he has 
told us what churches he founded, what difficulties he en- 
countered and what differences he provoked ; who helped 
him and who hindered. He has described the morals of the 
time in language of unparalleled plainness and power ; he has 
shown us the obstinacy of the Jew, the instability of the Gaul, 
the frivolous and disputatious temper, the intellectual subtlety 
and ethical obtuseness of the Greek ; and the part played by 
the wandering merchant or mechanic in the intercourse of 
the peoples, in the distribution of ideas and the diffusion of 



44Q PAUL AN EPITOME OF HIS DAY 

religion. He has informed us as to the kind of men that 
were made into Christians and the sort of Christians they 
made, the questions they discussed, the discipline they 
needed and the Churches enforced ; the ideals they lived for, 
and their effect on their lives. He has made us understand 
the minds of the men who founded the Church, the fears, the 
jealousies, the tendencies that divided them, the faith and 
hope that united them and made them better and greater 
builders than they knew. He has told us how he himself 
was judged, what he was in appearance, in speech, in writing ; 
how he suffered and what he suffered from ; how he per- 
suaded the Jew and the Gentile to live together and to help 
each other ; how his converts and how the men who were 
"reputed to be somewhat" esteemed him. In a word the 
questions that lie beneath phrases he lets almost unconsciously 
fall, carry us right into the heart of the constructive historical 
criticism of the New Testament. 

2. Now let us confess that Paul, as he lives before us in 
his Epistles, is a man who holds many men within him, — 
so many indeed that we may describe him as the most 
unintelligible of men to the analytical reason of a critic who 
has never warmed to the passion or been moved by the 
enthusiasm of humanity ; but the most intelligible of men to 
the man who has heard within himself the sound of all the 
voices that speak in man. He is a Jew, proud of his blood, 
but ashamed of its hot intolerance ; a Pharisee who has 
studied in the schools till he has learnt their formulae ; a 
convert who finds in his conversion the meaning of his own 
and his people's past ; a lover of righteousness who fears his 
own sin ; a believer whose will to obey God is crossed and 
weakened and thwarted by the passion which will lust ; a 
brother who would die for his brethren, yet holds a faith 
which exposes him to sufferings worse than death at their 
hands ; a kinsman disowned of his own kin, who could not 
then, and have never since been able to forgive his desertion 



THE MANNER OF THE MAN 441 

of their tribal banner and contempt for their racial vanity, 
though he has done more than any other son of the fathers 
to redeem their name from its worst vices, and shed upon it 
a more beneficent light than streams from the Ghetto or the 
Exchange. He is a man who despises life, yet endures all 
things that he may save men from death ; a person without 
sentiment, yet of the most commanding affection, mixing with 
the most obscure and illiterate, yet speaking to them with the 
courtesy which ought to be cultivated by the sons of God ; 
a man hated, hunted, persecuted, denied the comforts of 
home, the cheer and the joy of woman's love, the tenderness 
and trust of children he could call his own, yet writing the 
grandest words in praise of love which ever came from 
human pen ; a man who was mean outwardly, yet inwardly 
endowed with such strength as to lift the solid earth of 
religious custom, prejudice, and convention from off its axis. 
He uses a tongue which is in its words Greek but in its most 
distinctive idioms Hebrew, an inchoate dialect spoken by 
mixed peoples, which his thought, too massive and molten 
to be easily articulated, burdens with technical terms, ex- 
ceptional usages and broken sentences hard to be understood 
or subdued into grammatical continuity, but which his ima- 
gination so charges now and then with splendid images as to 
lift it into the highest poetry, breathing the hope that neither 
suffering nor death can shame, the love that is as high as God 
and vast as eternity. So potent is he that he makes out of 
the tongue he uses a sacred language, compelling, almost in 
spite of itself, the religion he has embraced to forget its 
native speech and speak the Gentile tongue he speaks, that 
it may be the more quickly communicated and become the 
more readily intelligible to the civilized world. In him the 
past of his faith is epitomized and its future is foretold. He 
starts as a Jew, a zealot in " the Jews' religion," becomes a 
disciple of the Jesus he had persecuted, an apostle of the 
Christ he had despised ; and he is driven by a logic which is 



442 THE MANY-SIDED PERSONALITY 

not so much his servant as his master to " preach among the 
Gentiles " " the faith of which he had once made havoc." l 
And he not only foresaw the end, but he even began to 
garner the fruits of the land towards which he was leading 
the Church. Among the last of his words these stand 
written : " All the saints salute you, especially they that are 
of Caesar's household." 2 

Paul, then, is the greatest literary figure in the New Testa- 
ment ; round him all its burning questions lie. Looked at as 
an historical question, say certain minor critics, Baur spared 
too much when he argued that the four great Pauline Epistles 
were authentic, for they leave all that is most supernatural 
in Christianity standing in its oldest period and attested by 
its oldest monuments. They leave also Paul in a position too 
large for any man, and force us to conceive him to be as large 
as his position. Hence a strained hypercriticism has of late 
attempted to reduce to intelligibility one who is not so much 
a single man as a multitude of men, though the multitude 
form only a many-sided personal unity ; and so they have 
analyzed the multitudinous unity into a number of atoms, 
each in size and shape convenient and comprehensible. And 
so we have had the Paul of our documents decomposed into 
three men, (a) the authentic portrait of the " We-sections " 
in the Acts, (/3) the man of the fragments saved from the 
wreckage of the Epistles, and (7) the man of the completed 
Acts, the creation of primitive harmonistic. And then the 
Epistles have to be so decomposed as to assent, as it were, to 
the decomposition of their author. But, happily, this criticism 
is sporadic and incidental ; the main body of critics who are 
also scholars holding that the authenticity of the greater 
Pauline Epistles is beyond doubt. And beyond doubt we 
may hold them to be. There are no writings so little capable 
of being explained by conscious or unconscious invention, or 
any trick of the pseudonymous imagination. They are filled 
1 Gal. i. 16, 17. 2 Phil. iv. 22. 



A CONSISTENT UNITY 443 

by one mind, the personality is one ; so are the speech 
and the mode of argument. The attitude to friend, to foe, 
to beliefs held and renounced, to Church and world, to the 
brothers he had forsaken, to the brethren who had but half 
welcomed him, to the disciples who would have plucked out 
their eyes and have given them to him, remains throughout 
consistently one and the same. This higher consistency is 
only emphasized by the minor inconsistencies of mood and 
moment ; for these were certain to come to one who lived so 
strenuous a life, so changeful in those outward circumstances 
which most affect a man's heart and imagination, so un- 
changeable in those tendencies and inner convictions which 
most govern the mind. We must, therefore, content ourselves 
with simply affirming the point that there are no questions 
in ancient literature more certainly determined than the au- 
thenticity of the Epistles which first formulated the belief in 
Christ's supernatural person and their priority to all the 
written Histories of His life. 

§ II. The Person of Christ in the Pauline Epistles 

Now when we come to compare the Pauline literature 
with the Synoptic Gospels, we find, as respects the treatment 
of the Person of Christ, two remarkable points of contrast. 

1. The biographical matter of the Epistles is, on the whole, 
simpler than that of the Gospels. The miracles which play 
so great a part in the latter have, with one conspicuous 
exception, no place in the former. Our reason is not per- 
plexed by any narrative of the supernatural birth, or any 
incident like that of the Gadarene swine ; we do not read of 
hungry thousands being fed, or of fish being charmed into 
a net or money extracted from one just caught in the lake ; 
of this woman being healed of an issue of blood, or of 
that paralytic man being made whole ; of a widow's son 
raised from the dead or a buried brother called back from 
the tomb. In a word, no attempt whatever is made to array 



444 CHRIST'S HISTORICAL POVERTY 

Jesus in the garments of miracle or to make Him live and 
move in a cycle of wonders. On the contrary, He is set amid 
a sordid poverty of incident, and lives a life which is more 
remarkable for its humiliation and feebleness than for its 
majesty or manifest divinity. He is born of a woman, and 
born under the law. 1 He springs from Israel, and is, according 
to the flesh, from the tribe of Judah and the seed of David. 2 
He lives in the form of a servant, 3 and is unknown to the 
princes of this world. 4 He is poor, hated, persecuted, 
crucified. 5 He is betrayed at nigh 4 :, just after He had in- 
stituted the Supper. 6 He dies on the cross, to which He 
had been fastened with nails, and is buried. 7 There is no 
attempt to idealize these things, to veil their squalor, or 
soften their harsher features ; rather are they emphasized and 
magnified as if they added lustre to the Person and were 
matters in which His admirers found their proudest cause for 
glorying. 

2. But this poverty of outward incident in the life lends all 
the more significance to the remarkable contrast between the 
local and particular supernaturalism of the histories and the 
universal and absolute supernaturalism of those apostolic 
Epistles which originated so soon after His death. What 
stands there is a miracle of act and incident ; what appears 
here is a Person so miraculous as to change the whole face 
of nature and history, and make it as miraculous as Himself. 

(a) He is so conceived that the race by His presence in it 
becomes a stupendous organism, with a continuous history, 
a common life, realized by its units yet incorporated in the 
laws, customs, and tendencies they all obey. But the life of 
the race is not simply physical, it is, though absolutely 
different in quality from His, yet as ethical as He Himself 

1 Gal. iv. 4. 2 Rom. ix. 5 ; i. 3. 

8 Phil. ii. 7. 4 1 Cor. ii. 8. 

5 2 Cor. viii. 9 ; Gal. vi. 14 ; 1 Cor. i. 23-25, ii. 2. 

6 1 Cor. xi. 23. 7 1 Cor. xv. 3, 4 ; Col. ii. 14. 



AND HIS IDEAL MAJESTY 445 

is ; and indicates that man, as regards the constituent ele- 
ments of his nature, falls under the law which in the case of 
Jesus made His character of the very essence of His being. 
And the character He bears is creative and normative ; it 
institutes a type and propagates the type it institutes. 
While all men have sinned, 1 He alone knows no sin. 3 The 
sin which all men know entered the world by the first man, 
and death so came in with sin that the two reign together 
over mankind ; but by Christ came righteousness and through 
it the life which cancels death. 3 And so over against the 
sinning Adam and his sinful posterity stands the sinless and 
quickening Christ with His household of faith. 4 The flesh of 
man is sinful and mortal, but He assumed flesh that He might 
condemn sin and create life. 5 While Adam, the first man, 
was but a " living soul," the second man was " a life-giving 
Spirit"; while Adam was of the earth, earthy, Christ is of 
heaven and heavenly. 6 And as He is His shall be. To be 
joined to Him is to be " one spirit " with Him. 7 To be " in 
Christ " is to be " a new creature " 8 " conformed to His 
image," 9 and " to the body of His glory," 10 for as " we have 
borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image 
of the heavenly." n And these " new creatures " are not a 
multitude of disconnected grains ; they are built into an 
organism and become "one body," " the body of Christ," 12 the 
home of His Spirit, the agency by which He accomplishes 
His will and shows Himself unto men. 13 To be Christ's is to 
be God's, to enjoy liberty, and to see God face to face. 14 
Hence collective man is represented as, apart from Him, 
alienated from God, sinful and dying because of sin ; but 

1 Rom. iii. 23. 2 2 Cor. v. 21. 

8 Rom. v. 12-21. * I Cor. xv. 21, 22 ; Eph. ii. 19-22. 
5 Rom. viii. 3, 11 ; 2 Cor. iv. 10, 11. 6 1 Cor. xv. 45-49. 

7 1 Cor. vi. 17. 8 2 Cor. v. 17. 

9 Rom. viii. 29. 10 Phil. iii. 21. 

11 1 Cor. xv. 49 ; cf. Eph. ii. 5, 6. 12 1 Cor. xii. 12, 27. 

13 Eph. iv. 16, i. 23 ; Col. ii. 19. 14 1 Cor. iii. 23 ; 2 Cor. iii. 17, 18. 



446 MAN UNITED IN HIM 



through Him men can be reconciled to God, learn obedi- 
ence, and be built into a new humanity, exercised in right- 
eousness, and ruled by love. 1 Now this was an idea without 
any parallel in the history of human belief ; so it has the 
most manifest right to be called a new idea. No one in any 
prior philosophy or scheme of thought had been conceived as 
so affecting the notion and life of humanity, so determining its 
constitution, so defining its character, so giving value to each 
separate unit, unity to its whole being, community to its 
interests, and continuity to its history ; in other words, as 
creating by his very being order and coherence in the chaotic 
and heterogeneous mass of conscious but unconnected atoms 
which we call mankind. 

(/3) But this is the least wonderful aspect of this audacious 
endeavour at the interpretation of an historical individual 
as a universal, i.e. as an absolutely supernatural and creative 
personality. For His relation to man has its counterpart 
and complement in His relation to God. Here the same 
singular and transcendental qualities are made to distinguish 
Him. He is to God what no other being has been before 
Him or can be after Him. He is the Son of God, the 
firstborn, begotten before all creation. 2 He is the image of 
the invisible God ; He sits at God's right hand ; He upholds 
all things by the word of His power, constitutes all things 
into order or system ; in other words, His cosmical relations 
are as absolute and creative as His historical are directive 
and judicial. 3 And His work is one which is worthy of the 
highest God : it is to create a new humanity and to be its 
Head. 4 His appearance is no chance or happy accident, but 
fulfils an eternal purpose. 5 And His coming is His own 
act, for though rich, it is for our sakes that He became poor, 6 

1 Rom. v. 12-21. 2 Rom. i. 2, viii. 29, 32 ; cf. Col. i. 15. 

a Col. i. 15-17 ; 1 Cor. xv. 24, 25 ; 2 Cor. v. 10. 
4 Eph. ii. 19-22 ; Col. i. 18. 5 Eph. i. 4, ii. 9-1 1. 

6 2 Cor. viii. 9. 



AND IN HIM GOD MANIFESTED 447 

or, to use the graphic phrase of another Pauline text, that He 
"emptied Himself" (eavTov eKevwcrev)} And so He is con- 
ceived, not as one who begins to be, but as one who has 
ever been and will ever be ; He through Whom are all 
things. 2 The very dignity and prerogatives of Deity are 
claimed for Him. He is said to be so in the form of God 
as to be under no need of counting it a prize to be on an 
equality with God, 3 and does not this mean that to Paul 
He already possessed the divine nature and majesty ? In all 
things He has the pre-eminence. 4 Even the unity which is 
the ultimate attribute of Deity is not denied Him. As there 
is but one God and Father, so there is but one Lord Jesus 
Christ ; 5 in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and 
knowledge ; 6 in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily, 7 and His love can as little be measured as the love 
of God, 8 for He is indeed in very truth God's love towards 
man. 

§ III. The Idea in Hebrews and the Apocalypse 

But the interpretation of the person is not peculiar to the 
Pauline theology ; if it were, it might be regarded as the 
illusion of a mind intoxicated with metaphysics, or accus- 
tomed to the dreamland of an ecstatic mysticism. But the 
idea, so far from being singular, pervades a whole literature, 
though all we can do here is to select its most representative 
types. 

1. The Epistle to the Hebrews is not Paul's, but it has 
many Pauline affinities. It is the work of a man who knew 
Philo and Alexandria as Paul knew Jerusalem and Gamaliel. 
Its outlook is less wide and more special ; it thinks more of 
the Jews and less of man. But its philosophy, if narrower, 

1 Phil. ii. 7. 2 1 Cor. viii. 6. 

8 Phil. ii. 6. * Col. i. 18. 

5 1 Cor. viii. 6 ; Eph. iv. 5. 6 Col. ii. 3. 

7 Col. ii. 9. 8 Eph. iii. 19. 



448 RELIGIOUS PERSONALITY INTERPRETED 

is more reasoned in its principles and detailed in its applica- 
tion. The rhetorical style, the technical terms, the occasional 
preciosity of phrase, the love of analogies, the interpretation 
of history as allegory and of institutions as symbols or parables, 
speak of the school in which the writer had studied. But 
the marvellous thing is the way in which the new idea lifts 
the man above his school, enlarges his outlook, and completes 
his thought. The Epistle to the Hebrews may be termed 
the most finished treatise of the Alexandrian philosophy ; it 
grapples more successfully than any other with the problems 
of nature, mind and history. And it does this in the strength 
of its new idea : what the person of Christ signifies for God, 
for man and for religion. On the speculative side it re-inter- 
prets God and makes creation intelligible ; on the historical, 
it exalts man and turns his life into a process of growth and 
education ; on the religious, it finds a unity of idea within 
diversity of form, and it proves faith to be universal and 
constant, for its object is "the same yesterday, to-day and 
for ever." x 

The author was indeed no ear- or eyewitness of the Lord, 2 
but he speaks as one familiar with His history on both its 
brighter and its darker sides. He knew of His descent, 3 of 
His preaching and the signs and wonders which accompanied 
it, 4 of the temptations He endured, 5 of the contradiction He 
had to bear from sinners, 6 of the agony in the garden, 7 of the 
death upon the cross, 8 of the hill " outside the gate " where 
He suffered, 9 and of His being raised from the dead. 10 His 
humanity is real, 11 and He is distinguished by being unblem- 
ished, 12 by "godly fear," docility, amenability to discipline; 13 
by mercy, grace and fidelity towards men, 14 and by obedi- 
ence, faith and patience towards God. 15 Jesus is "without 



1 


xiii. 8. 




2 ii- 3- 




3 


vii. 14. 


4 ii- 3, 4- 


5 


ii. 1 8, iv. 


15- 


6 xii. 3. 




7 


v. 7. 


8 xii. 2. 


9 


xiii. 12. 




10 xiii. 20. 




11 


ii. 14, 17. 


12 ix. 14. 


13 


v. 1 8. 




14 ii. 17, iv. 


IS- 


15 


iii. 2, v. 8, ii. 


13, x. 5-7, xii. 2, 



THROUGH THE ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY 449 

sin"; 1 He is "holy, guileless, undefiled, and separated from 
sinners." 2 The author so speaks of the historical person as 
to show that his knowledge was equal to his love, and his 
love of the intensest and most commanding order. And 
yet without any sense of incongruity, or of intellectual 
discord, or of rational violence, he speaks of this Jesus as 
" the Son of God," 3 and of this Son as the Maker of the 
worlds, the effulgence of God's glory and the very image 
of His substance ; as the heir of all things, begotten of God, 
His firstborn, to whom He said, " Thy throne, O God, is for 
ever and ever." 4 Jesus is indeed described as having been 
made " a little lower than the angels" ; 5 but though He be- 
comes partaker of " flesh and blood " 6 He does not cease to 
be Son or lose His high prerogatives ; nay, He becomes this 
only that He may on a new and higher plane carry out His 
divine creative and administrative functions. The Mediator 
of creation becomes "the Mediator of the New Covenant" ; 7 
"the heir of all things" becomes the builder of God's house, 8 
and so the architect of an edifice whose material is " living 
stones " and not dead " things." Hence new titles come to 
Him: He is "the High Priest of our confession," 9 and as 
such He is " without father, without mother, without genea- 
logy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life." 10 
As such He is the essence or Spirit of all religious institu- 
tions, the Creator of the men of faith and sanctity under 
the old covenant, the inaugurator who is also the sum and 
substance of the new. His concealed presence in the old 
was the reason of its being ; His revealed presence in the 
new is the cause of its life. In Him God and man, eternity 
and time, creation and history, the ancient and transient 
religion of sense and the perennial and permanent religion 
of the Spirit, find their unity. It is a high dream and a 



1 iv. 15. 


2 vii. 26. 


3 v. 5. 


4 i. 2.A 


5 ii. 9. 


6 ii. 14. 


7 . xii. 24. 


8 iii. 3- 


9 iii. 1. 


10 vii. 3. 






P.C.R. 






29 



450 THE PERSON IN THE APOCALYPSE 

spacious philosophy, cast perhaps into a form congenial to 
minds which thought concerning the New Testament in the 
categories of the Old, but representing truths which the 
speculative reason has unweariedly felt after without being 
able to find. And the whole is the spontaneous creation of 
the new idea as to the person of Christ. 

2. The Apocalypse is in form, occasion, standpoint, method, 
purpose, the very antithesis of both Paul and Hebrews. 
Under one aspect it is the most Jewish, under another it is 
the most anti-Judaic writing in the New Testament. It is 
possessed of the idea that the spiritual Israel is to supersede 
the Israel of the flesh, and that the new Jerusalem is to 
displace and supplant the old ; but it holds the idea in the 
face of a recent and most imperious dread. In place of 
Paul's fear of the Judaizer, of the alarm which the author 
of Hebrews feels lest his kinsmen should draw back, there 
has come terror of Rome. The seer has watched the giant 
awaken from his sleep, and dye his hands in the blood of 
the saints. And it is not the majesty of Rome that has 
awakened, but the ferocity of her emperor. And a ferocious 
man is more terrible than any wild beast, most terrible of 
all when he sits on a throne which enables him to indulge 
his lust for blood. It is this fear of the brute who has 
reigned and is to reign that fills the Apocalypse ; but over 
against it stands the hope that stills terror. Above the masters 
of the earth sits the King of kings, and He shall compel 
even the wrath of man to praise Him. 1 He, too, has shed His 
blood like a martyr. 2 His blood is real, for He is of the tribe 
of Judah and the house of David. 3 He died, but now He 
lives for evermore. 4 He redeems and governs the new Israel. 5 
He is Alpha and Omega, 6 occupies the throne of God, 7 is 
worshipped and adored, 8 judges the nations, and is terrible 



1 Rev. xvii. 14, xix. 16. 


»i. s- 


3 v. 5 


4 i. 18. 5 i. 6. 


6 i. 17, 18. 


7 vi. 1 


8 v. 8-14 ; cf. vii. 12. 







AND IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL 451 

to the kings of the earth. 1 We have so little sympathy with 
the Apocalyptic spirit, so feel its elaborate visions, its violent 
ecstasies, recondite metaphors, and mystic numbers to be alien 
to the modern mind, that we can hardly discover the imagin- 
ation that penetrates and illumines it. But one thing is 
obvious : all it has of foresight and permanent worth it 
owes to its idea of Christ and the place it assigns to Him. 

§ IV. The Idea in the Gospel of John 

But the most significant and picturesque presentation of 
the idea is to be found in the history ascribed to the Apostle 
John. The Fourth Gospel seems in form, in style, and in 
tone a work of lucid and ingenuous simplicity, but in matter 
and idea it is, speculatively, the most audacious book in the 
New Testament. It ventures to do what neither Paul nor 
Hebrews had attempted — to bring the speculative idea of 
Christ into direct relation with the history of Jesus ; yet 
without this their discussions wanted the touch of reality. 
For the ideal Christ represents a thesis comparatively easy 
to expound and defend ; but the actual Jesus as the em- 
bodiment of the ideal presents a problem infinitely more 
complex and difficult. To conceive a transcendental ideal 
which is the unity of Deity and humanity, to seek a pro- 
phecy for it in history and a need for it in nature, to find 
in it the end towards which all religions yearn, and the 
latent thought which all philosophers have laboured to ex- 
press — is simply to charge oneself with the elaboration of a 
system which is none the less intellectual that it is dedicated 
to a religious purpose. But the Fourth Gospel essays a 
mightier problem, viz. to connect the person and the history 
of Jesus, on the one hand, with the inmost being of God, and, 
on the other, with the course and end of the universe. 

1. The idea and purpose of the writer can best be under- 
stood through the prologue which introduces the history. 2 
1 ii. 26, 27. 2 i. 1-18. 



452 THE PROLOGUE: ITS THEOLOGY 

He begins at a higher altitude than the ancient seer who saw 
God " in the beginning " create the world, for he attempts to 
define the sort of God who created. Eternity was not to him 
a solitude, nor God a solitary. God had never been alone, 
for with Him was the Logos, and the Logos was at once 
God, and " in the beginning face to face with God." (Ovto% 
rjv iv apxf) 7rpo? rov 0e6v.) And He was organ of the 
Godhead in the work of creation : " all things were made 
by Him." And the life He gave He possessed ; in Him the 
creation lived, and His life was its light. But this light was 
confronted by a darkness which would not be overcome, 
though it was not possible that the Logos should consent to 
have His light overcome of the darkness. In brief but preg- 
nant phrases the author describes the method and means 
which the Logos used in this supreme conflict. His relation 
to the creation never ceased ; at every point and every 
moment He was active within it. In this way he stood dis- 
tinguished from the prophet or preacher, who had his most 
recent type in the Baptist. John was a man sent from God 
for an occasion ; before it he had no being, after it he had no 
function ; his sole duty was to be a witness, to testify con- 
cerning the Light " in order that all men through him might 
believe." Over against this ephemeral witness-bearer, who 
appears, lives his brief day, does his little work, and then 
departs, stands the true, the Eternal Light. He shines for ever 
and everywhere ; illumines all men, even though they be held 
to be heathen. With threefold emphasis the idea is repeated : 
" He was in the world," did not enter or come to be within it, 
but abode in it, was as old as it, is as young as it, unaffected 
by birth, untouched by death. He was, and had always 
been, for " the world was made by Him " ; Man — no selected 
people simply, but collective Man — was made by Him, and 
how could He desert the work of His own hands ? But it 
had deserted Him : " the world knew Him not." The peoples 
loved the darkness and knew not the Light. Even those who 



AND RELATION TO THE HISTORY 453 

claimed to be the elect were blind. " He came unto His 
own, and His own received Him not." The children of the 
covenant, the heirs of the promise, had been no better than 
the heathen: the Logos who lived and worked in their midst 
they did not know. But in one respect they had greater 
excellence : sight was granted to some, a remnant saw and 
believed, and He of His grace gave them the right to " be- 
come children of God." And this adoption came not of 
blood or descent or act of man ; it was " of God." It was a 
vain boast to say, " We have Abraham to our father " ; the 
only title to divine sonship came of divine grace. And now 
there arrived the supreme moment in human experience : the 
Logos, who was Creator and uncreated Light, who had never 
ceased to be related to all men or to be without His own 
even among the Jews, " He became flesh." The phrase is 
peculiar ; he does not say, as in the case of John, eyevejo 
avOpayTTos direaTaX/juevos irapa deov, " there came a man sent 
from God " ; but he says, 6 X0705 aap% iyevero, "the Word be- 
came flesh." There is no break in this continuity; it is the 
same Word who was with God, who was God, who made the 
worlds, who was the true Light, who shone in the darkness, 
who continued to shine among the heathen, who visited His 
own, and graciously made those who believed sons of God, 
who now becomes flesh. And what He becomes (o-apg) em- 
phasizes the visible mortal man, man not in contrast to 
animal, but in antithesis to God, the invisible, eternal, im- 
palpable Deity. Paul loved to express the sacrifice or re- 
nunciation of the Son — " though rich, yet for our sakes He 
became poor," " though in the form of God He emptied 
Himself" ; but John here expresses the unity of the Being 
within the difference of the acts and relations. He who did 
all these high things is the self-same Logos, as He who now 
becomes flesh. And in this form, in contrast to His previous 
invisible though illuminative universality, He dwells among 
men, lives face to face with them even as in the beginning He 



454 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE LOGOS 

had been with God. But lest the intellectual term Logos 
should be resolved into an abstraction or mere figure of speech, 
a significant change is made in the terms employed. " The 
Word become flesh " is described as " only-begotten from the 
Father," the bearer of " grace and truth " to men. And as 
such He is identified with Jesus Christ. And this marvellous 
conception is finally explained and justified by a principle of 
widest reach : " No man hath seen God at any time ; the 
only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He 
hath declared Him." This principle we may paraphrase and 
explain thus : " Monotheism has failed because men have 
found the invisible to be an inaccessible God ; they feel after 
Him, and want to handle Him ; but one who is simply the 
negation of all their experience they can neither conceive 
nor believe. And so He has stooped to their need, and has 
sent out from His own bosom, clothed in palpable flesh and 
blood, His only-begotten Son, that He might declare Him, 
make Him actual, visible, tangible to the dwellers in the 
world of sense." That was the principle the gospel was to 
illustrate ; whether it has been confuted or confounded by 
collective experience, is a matter of too common knowledge 
to need to be here discussed. 

2. But the remarkable thing in the gospel is not so much 
the Prologue as the History which it introduces, and by which 
it is explicated. Analytical criticism has much to say as to 
the Hellenic and Hellenistic sources of the terms and ideas 
which the Evangelist makes use of. Aoyos is one of the 
dark terms we owe to Heraclitus ; from him it passed into 
the school of the Stoics, and was there stamped with their 
image and superscription. In the Hellenism of Alexandria 
it played a great part, and was made by Philo a mediator 
between God and the universe, with a vast variety of names 
and functions : He conceived it now as abstract, now as per- 
sonal ; described it now as archangel, now as archetype ; here 
as the Idea idearum which is ever with God, there as " the 



AND THE HISTORY OF JESUS 455 

everlasting law of the eternal God, which is the most stable 
and secure support of the universe." Philo's logos is now the 
image of God, now His eldest or firstborn Son, and again 
the organ by which He made the world. Here God is light, 
and the Word its archetype and example ; and there God is 
life, while all who live irrationally (d\6ya)<;) are separated 
from the life which is in Him. It is not to be doubted, then, 
that John neither invented his transcendental terms nor the 
ideas they expressed. But he did a more daring and original 
thing — he brought them out of the clouds into the market- 
place, incorporated, personalized, individuated them. He 
distinctly saw what the man who had coined the terms had 
been dimly feeling after — that a solitary Deity was an impo- 
tent abstraction, without life, without love, void of thought, 
incapable of movement, and divorced from all reality. But 
his vision passed through the region of speculation, and 
discovered the Person who realized his ideal. Logos he 
translated by Son, and in doing so he did two things — revo- 
lutionized the conception of God, and changed an abstract 
and purely metaphysical idea into a concrete and intensely 
ethical person. And then he made this person take flesh and 
become a visible God ; but with the most singular audacity 
he restricted this incarnation to a single individual whom he 
identified with Jesus of Nazareth, and then straightway pro- 
ceeded to tell His history. And he told it simply, directly, as 
one who was only concerned to place on record things he him- 
self had seen. It is significant that he does not descend from 
his transcendental to his historical idea, but, conversely, he 
rises from the historical to the transcendental. It is because 
he has heard with his ears, seen with his eyes, handled with 
his hands that he knows the Word of Life. 1 The thing he most 
fears is the denial that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. 2 
The personal name Jesus is the one he most loves to use ; 
and His human qualities — sympathy, tenderness, simplicity, 
1 1 John i. 1. 2 1 John ii. 18, iv. 2, 3. 



456 JESUS THE ETERNAL IDEAL OF MAN 

courtesy, friendliness, love — are those he most emphasizes. 
He likes to think of Him as "Jesus Christ the righteous," 
sinless, yet our example, who constrains us to purify our- 
selves even as He is pure. 1 The Fourth is, indeed, the most 
human of all the Gospels, whose hero is the veritable Son 
of Man. 2 

Yet within the biography John skilfully enshrined his 
transcendental idea. The Person was to him a symbol as 
well as a fact, His history was at once allegorical and real. 
His purpose is expressed in one of his most distinctive terms, 
" true " (a\r]di,v6<;), " true light," " true worshipper," " true 
Bread," " He that sent Me is true " ; " My judgment is true," 
" I am the true vine," " the only true God." The term de- 
notes not simply the true as opposed to the false, but the 
real as opposed to the apparent, the original as distinct from 
the derived, the genuine in contrast to the counterfeit. And 
these antitheses help to define each other, and to make the 
history articulate the author's thought. Hence he sees Jesus 
not merely as a man, or historical person, but as a form 
under which the eternal ideal has been so realized as to turn 
the scenes and shapes around Him into shadows that now 
hide, now outline, and now counterfeit the reality. Thus the 
supreme need of the created order is, because of its ignorance 
and evil, reconciliation with the Creator ; and this reconcilia- 
tion is conceived as coming through the light which illumines, 
the life which quickens, the love which saves. And these are 
incarnate in Jesus. The Word who became flesh is as it 
were the tabernacle of a universal religion ; in Him God 
came to men, and men met God, and the glory which they 
beheld was His very visible presence. 3 As the one real place 
of meeting He is the ladder which connects heaven and earth, 
keeping open God's way down to man, man's way up to God. 4 
He is the genuine temple, which men will seek to destroy, 

1 I John ii. I, iii. 3-7. * Ante, p. 326. 

8 i. 14. 4 i. 51. 



AND TRUE TABERNACLE OF RELIGION 457 

but He will reconstruct ; x and over against Him stands the 
local temple, which is the shadow of the real and universal, 
good if taken as a type, but bad if regarded as sufficient in 
itself, and still worse if conceived as a final and abiding 
reality. And as He is the true Temple, He is also the true 
Sacrifice — " the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of 
the world." 2 Other sacrifices are of man's providing and 
offering ; He alone is of God. And so from Him comes life, 
through Him streams light ; the light is the shadow of His 
truth, the life the fruit of His death. 3 And He who is at 
once the true temple and the true sacrifice is also the true 
Priest, the Mediator through whom the " righteous Father " 
reaches the world, and the sinful man finds his way to 
God. 4 The priests around Him are, like their temple and 
sacrifices, shadows — good if they speak of another, but bad 
exceedingly if they attempt to become the very form and 
being of the Eternal, and seek to suppress the manifested 
God as if He were the semblance and they the supreme 
reality. And so the Fourth Gospel may be termed a tragic 
parable narrated of God and His universe under the form of 
an actual transaction in time and space. There has come 
within the experience of man the most transcendent of all 
mysteries : the mind of God is translated into his speech, the 
life of God assumes his shape ; and in a history which is all 
the more terribly real that it is so supremely ideal we see 
the characters, relations, and behaviours of God and man 
explicated by being realized. 

1 ii. 19-21. * i. 29. 

3 iii. 16-21 ; x. 7-18 ; viii. 12. 4 xvii. 25. 






CHAPTER II 

THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA 

§ I. The Idea and the Apostolic Literature 

THE idea of the person of Christ may, at this point, be 
best described as an idea generative of a whole litera- 
ture. Without it the Apostles would have remained silent, 
mere craftsmen of the lake, the workshop or the school ; but 
from it there came an impulse which drove them into speech. 
And the speech into which they were driven was an attempt 
not simply to portray a person but to articulate a system of 
religious thought. If it had not been for two reasons which, 
though they look like contraries, are yet essentially comple- 
mentary, its religious significance and its want of literary dis- 
tinction, the New Testament would have seemed to us the 
greatest speculative achievement of antiquity, all the more 
extraordinary that its authors were men unversed in literature 
and philosophy, without any knowledge of the problems with 
which human thought had wrestled or any of the argumenta- 
tive skill which comes from long discipline in the dialectical 
art. By a sort of divination, the intuition which a new faith 
can create in the most simple, the apostolic men saw ideas 
which the most gifted minds had wished to see but had not 
seen : — The unity of God so realized in a universal religion as 
to unite all the families of men ; the unity of man in blood 
and spirit, in source and destiny, the reign in him of a natural 
law which was good, and of inherited tendencies which were 
evil ; the dream of a development which conceived the race 

458 



IDEAS BEGOTTEN BY THE INTERPRETATION 459 

as a magnified individual and the individual as an epitomized 
race, each repeating the stages of growth and the process of 
education marked and observed by the other ; the vision of a 
sovereignty that never ceased to govern in nature and history, 
the eternal power and Godhead of the Sovereign being clearly 
seen through the things that are made, and His beneficence 
shown in never selecting men and nations for their own sakes 
alone, but only as agents for the common good ; the idea of a 
humanity of the Spirit, a household of the elect, created by 
faith in the Eternal and creating obedience to His ends ; the 
conception of a person who is an embodied moral law, with 
this to distinguish Him from all ethical standards man had ever 
imagined, that He not only humanized duty but supplied 
the motive that determined its fulfilment ; the notion of this 
same person, who is the sum of mankind as also the image of 
God, accomplishing in a moment of colossal existence for all 
mankind what the election of grace had been attempting to do 
for each successive generation ; the belief that the God who 
had made all men was so good that He could not be alienated 
by evil from the men He had made, but suffered on account 
of their sin and saved them by His suffering ; the conviction 
that all men were amenable to this God, that they must 
appear before Him, see His awfulness, hear His judgment, 
and share His immortality, so that His eternity embosomed 
and enlarged their hour of mortal being and gave to it and to 
them a dignity almost divine — these, and a multitude more 
of cognate ideas, all too immense and too novel to be at once 
appreciated, or even understood, entered the world through 
the men who attempted to interpret for us the person of 
Christ ; and because of this attempted interpretation, the 
intellectual system they created was not so much the child 
of the old world as the mother of the new. It formed 
the mind which disintegrated the ancient order and organ- 
ized another on the lines and in the forms we conceive 
as specifically modern. The source to which the ideas that 



460 THE IDEA IN THE HANDS OF GREEKS 

distinguish society as it now is from society as it once was 
can be traced back, is a source which has an indefeasible 
claim to eminence in reason as well as in religion. It were 
but an idle fancy were we to ask what would have happened 
had this idea fallen into the hands of Plato and Aristotle 
rather than into those of John and Paul ; only this much is 
certain, it would have done even more for them and their 
immortality than they could have achieved for it. If Plato 
would have clothed it in a pomp of diction more congruous 
to its innate grandeur, if Aristotle would have analyzed it 
with infinite subtlety and explained it with incomparable 
lucidity, it on its side would have enabled the one to delineate 
a richer, a more humane, and a more practicable society than 
he has imagined, and the other to define a higher good and 
find a more potent and palpable ethical motive than he was 
able to discover. But the absence of the sage and the 
scholar from its exponents enables us the better to see that 
the very incompetence of the men it inspired to do justice to 
the idea exalts its meaning and its power. They by their 
own art could have done nothing for it ; it by its native 
majesty did everything for them. 

But is not this to assume the 'very issue in dispute, 
whether they were or were not equal to its production ? If 
they were, there is no question : if they were not, whence did 
the idea come? Whose was the beneficent hand that 
started it on its creative career ? 

§ II. Whether Paul was the Father of the Idea 

I. The really significant fact for our discussion is this : 
While the idea receives what many think its most finished 
expression in the latest of the apostolical writings, it yet 
appears in a form quite as transcendental in the earliest and 
most authentic of them. With it these writings are con- 
cerned from first to last ; and any differences in detail, in the 
connexion in which it stands or the purposes to which it is 



WHETHER PAUL'S INVENTION 461 

put, and the tendencies that determine these things, only 
accentuate this fundamental agreement. Now, it is evident 
that since the idea is articulated in our oldest authorities, 
which are the great Pauline Epistles, our present enquiry 
must begin with their author, and we must ask, whether there 
is in his temper, mind, or history anything that could be 
regarded as adequate to its causation. One thing is indeed 
remarkable, the rational sobriety of the writer. If intellectual 
sanity marked the miraculous narratives of the Gospels, it 
distinguishes in a still higher degree the Pauline dialectic. 
It may be impassioned, here and there too sharply anti- 
thetical in style, and its sequences may now and then be diffi- 
cult to follow ; but no argument could be more rigorous, no 
thinking more under the command of reason and logic or 
more free from the extravagances of the visionary, or the 
tendency which marks the fanatic, to confuse the imagined 
with the real, the ephemeral with the permanent. Now it is 
a question of more than common interest : By what process 
did Paul come to conceive and formulate his idea of Christ ? 
What was its psychological source ? and in what terms may 
we describe the factors of its origin ? The subjective 
sources, the personal roots, the biographical and historical 
causes of the Pauline theology, are matters that in recent 
years have been minutely and curiously investigated, (i.) It 
has been argued, on the basis of certain narratives and 
phrases of his own, that he was a man of nervous tempera- 
ment, prone to see visions and dream dreams ; that he was a 
subject of epilepsy, which was his thorn in the flesh, the 
messenger of Satan that buffeted him. What he thought a 
sore burden and sorrow was the very source of his inspira- 
tion ; whence came, on the one hand, his vision of Christ, his 
belief in Him, in His death for sin, in His resurrection and 
session at the right hand of God ; and, on the other, his 
doctrine of the flesh, of the natural man, and of the body of 
death, (ii.) It has been argued that his personal history as 



462 THEORIES AS TO PAULINE AUTHORSHIP 

a Pharisee who believed in the law, convinced him of the 
weakness of the law he believed in. It imperiously com- 
manded " Thou shalt not covet " l — the point is significant — 
but did nothing for the suppression of covetousness ; and the 
union in it of the imperious and the powerless made it seem 
that most intolerable of all dead things — an authority that 
could not be obeyed yet would not be denied, (iii.) It has 
been argued, on the one side, that he came to his views 
suddenly and completely, that by what we may call intuition 
and he called revelation 2 he saw them at once and saw them 
whole ; and, on the other, that he grew into them, taught by 
experience, by controversy, by seeing how they affected the 
minds of men in many lands, by the way in which he him- 
self was regarded, and his preaching was handled here by 
Jews, there by Apostles, in this church by Judaizers, and in 
that city by Greeks and Barbarians, (iv.) It has further been 
argued that his idea of Christ expressed the belief that his 
new life was God's work in him, effected by one he could 
not conceive as less than God's own Son ; and that his 
theology was his theory as to his own conversion objectified, 
articulated, made into a system of the universe. Now these 
may all be interesting speculations, but what impresses one 
is their inadequacy as causes to produce the facts they would 
explain. The man is too large to have himself and his beliefs 
cast in a single mould, or shaped by a single circumstance, 
or resolved by a disabling constitutional peculiarity which 
may explain a mood, but cannot explain a history and a 
character maintained in consistency for a generation amid 
distracting labours and controversies. Historical and literary 
criticism has need to sit at the feet of science and learn the 
lesson that nothing can be accepted either as the sole cause 
or as the adequate reason for an event which cannot explain 
either it or its effects. 

Paul, then, seems too wide and too complex a person to 
1 Rom. vii. 7. Gal. i. 16. 



AND SOURCES OF PAULINE THEOLOGY 463 

be reduced to the terms of a single process in a simple and 
prosaic psychology ; and his thought is as manifold as his 
personality. If we doubt this, we have but to review the 
attempts which have been made so to analyze the constitutive 
or structural elements of his mind and theology as to dis- 
cover their sources, (i.) It has been argued that he remained 
as he was born and bred and educated, a Jew, especially in 
his attitude to the Old Testament ; but this fails to account for 
the remarkable fact that, while he used it in argument and 
as evidence, as he used the light of nature in reason and in 
conscience, and the lessons of observation and experience, 
yet he did not find in it the cause of his salvation or seek in 
it the law of his life, (ii.) The theology of the synagogue has 
been pressed into the service of explaining his method, his 
cardinal terms, his forensic ideas, his eschatology and angel- 
ology ; but this theory is urged in curious oversight of the 
facts that the synagogue was his most inveterate enemy 
and that his most enthusiastic disciples were those least 
distinguished by the Jewish mind or learning. (iii.) The 
Apocalyptic literature has been made to contribute to the 
formation of his thought ; but its contributions have been 
illustrative of single points, and these so little distinctively 
Pauline as to be mainly in epistles of doubtful authenticity, 
(iv.) It is remembered that he was a son of the Diaspora, 
and the influence of Hellenism has been traced in his mind. 
Philo and his school have explained his love of allegory and 
the allegorical interpretation of events and persons in Old 
Testament history ; * but this touches only an outer fringe of 
method and style, not the substance and structure of his 
thought. As a child of Israel in exile he must have known 
Greek life, and in a measure Greek thought, in a degree 
which the older scholarship — -which mainly studied his 
classical quotations — utterly failed to recognize; and so we 
have had exhaustive analyses of the ideas and terms and 
1 Cf. Gal. iv. 21-31 ; 1 Cor. x. 4. 



464 PSYCHOLOGY, EDUCATION, AND EXPERIENCE 

even usages he may have owed to the mysteries ; the ethical 
impulse and teaching that may have come from the Stoics ; 
the Hellenic outlook on life and thought which may have 
come from his birth and upbringing in a Greek city ; the 
ideas of law, the feeling for liberty, the sense of dignity 
that may have come to him from his Roman citizenship ; 
and the conception of a universal church which he may have 
acquired through his experience as a traveller within the 
Roman Empire. But what does this quest after sources, 
which turn out to be only outer and partial influences, mean ? 
That the man was large enough to have found room in his 
nature for all they could bring to him ; but that he was too 
strongly and too distinctly himself to be capable of ex- 
planation either by any single influence in particular or by 
all the suggested influences combined. His personality has 
to be reckoned with before their action can be understood. 

2. As to the whole subject, then, we may say this : while it 
is not easy to over-estimate the interest of these questions, 
it is very easy to over-emphasize their worth. The psycho- 
logical theory which helps us to understand the tendencies 
which predispose him to believe may do nothing whatever to 
explain the cause and ground of his beliefs, their intrinsic 
rationality, their intellectual coherence and cogency, their 
value to man and their function in his history ; and yet it is 
by these tests that they must be finally judged. Looking, 
however, at what we may call its natural history, we may 
note that there were factors which made for the belief as well 
as against it. 

(a) There are those which concern the man himself ; and 
here we have to recognize forces which were distinctly 
hostile. It is extraordinary indeed that a doctrine of such 
stupendous novelty arose on such a soil in so short a period 
through such a man ; and so tenaciously rooted itself in a 
mind that was by tradition, inherited prejudice, education or 
the want of it, so little qualified for its inception or its recep- 



AS FACTORS OF THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 465 

tion. What is evident is this : the man who elaborated the 
doctrine was a man who had been trained in Jewish schools, 
educated in the Jewish Law, and so bred that the passion of 
the Jew for monotheism and against any intermixture of God 
with man was woven into the very texture of his thought 
and speech. He had therefore no natural or acquired pre- 
disposition to the belief, though, indeed, he never conceived 
that by embracing the new he had been false to the old. 
On the contrary he believed that his monotheistic faith was 
clarified, enlarged, and preserved more effectually by his 
doctrine as to Christ than by any form it had yet assumed 
or any agency that had hitherto worked on its behalf. Faith 
accomplished that which the law had been intended to do but 
had failed to achieve — made the God of the Jews the God 
of the whole earth. He had then a most exalted idea of 
God, and a most intense abhorrence of the notion that there 
could be more gods than one. The idea of Christ prevailed 
only because he conceived that through Him the one God 
was made the only God of universal man. 

But (/3) there were certain forces in his mind and cir- 
cumstances that were prophetic of change. Thus his very 
passion for the law of his God tended to estrange him from 
the law of his people ; for the people's law demanded an 
obedience which it could not empower the will to render. It 
asked so much and gave so little that it filled the man in the 
very degree of his conscientiousness with doubt and despair. 
But what the law could not do Jesus as the Christ had done ; 
the power the law withheld He had imparted. And it was 
this sense of the power which lived in Him that found expres- 
sion in Paul's theology ; and it was an expression which did 
not proceed from ignorance of what Jesus had been, but was 
rooted in the fullest knowledge as to the life He had lived 
and the death He had died. Paul says that he had known 
" Christ after the flesh," 1 which does not mean that he had 

1 2 Cor. v. 16. 

P.C.R. 30 



466 WHERE PSYCHOLOGY FAILS AND WHERE 

had personal intercourse with Jesus while He lived, but it 
means that he had taken the same external or ceremonial 
view of the Messiah as the Jews had done, i.e. he had con- 
ceived Him as a sort of impersonated ritual rather than as 
the Spirit that quickened. Yet though he does not say that 
he had known Jesus in the flesh, we may infer that he had 
had opportunities for such knowledge. He must have been 
in Jerusalem, if not at the crucifixion, yet immediately after 
it. He must have heard in the school of Gamaliel the stories 
connected with the betrayal and the crucifixion. He must 
thus have come to know Jesus, not through the fond affection 
of the disciple or the admiration of the man who had be- 
lieved and loved, but through the criticism of the man that 
doubted, the prejudices of the man that despised, the hatred 
of the man who had persecuted. And, as he himself tells 1 
us, he had acted towards the Church as one whose know- 
ledge was of this cruel and distorted kind. But in the very 
struggle to obey the law which commanded him to trouble 
and waste the Church, he discovered two things, (a) its 
ethical or spiritual impotence, i.e. its power to forbid but its 
inability to inspire with the spirit that obeyed ; and (/3) the 
potency of Jesus, as shown in the men he persecuted, to 
command obedience and to inspire with the love that was 
willing for His sake to endure the loss of all things and 
even of life itself. And this discovery involved a change of 
relation to Jesus, and therefore a changed attitude to the 
law. He saw that Jesus had introduced a new kind of 
obedience, a new ideal of righteousness, a new mode of find- 
ing acceptance with God, and that He had, by redeeming 
man from the curse of the law, achieved his salvation. 

This may represent in an approximate degree the psycho- 
logical process by which Paul came to his view as to Jesus 
being the Christ. As such it may have real biographical 
value, and even much critical significance ; but it fails to 

1 Gal. i. 13, 14- 



IT SUCCEEDS; THE MYTHICAL THEORY 467 

explain the only four things worth explaining ; viz., (i.) how 
he came to conceive Jesus not simply as the Messiah, but as 
the Son of God, not officially or figuratively, but essentially, 
i.e. as Himself divine ; (ii.) how it happened that a theory 
which had so arisen could so profoundly modify the man's 
whole conception of the universe, and take such possession 
of his intellectual nature ; (iii.) how it could create the re- 
ligion that has been the most important factor in the higher 
history and better life of the race ; and (iv.) how it was that 
the idea was not peculiar to Paul but common to the apos- 
tolical society as a whole, including those men from whom he 
is conceived to have differed so widely and so strenuously. 

§ III. Whether the Idea is the Product of a Mythical 

Process 

While, then, it may be needful to recognize how much the 
experience and the peculiar psychology of Paul helped to 
create his attitude of reverence to the person of Jesus, yet 
we must also recognize how little they can explain either the 
genesis or the form of his idea. But there is an older and 
more radical hypothesis as to its rise, what used to be 
called the mythical theory. The change from mythology 
to psychology is significant of the new historical method ; but 
the change is more formal than real. The one attempts to 
get at the subjective cause of what the other studied as a 
more or less objective process. Historical psychology is an 
analysis of the personal source, whether morbid or normal, 
of the ideas or beliefs which, when woven into a system or a 
history, constitute a mythology. 

1. The theory of a mythical and imaginative origin for the 
idea may be stated thus : The death of Jesus was a complete 
surprise and disillusionment to His disciples. They had be- 
lieved Him to be the victorious and immortal Messiah ; they 
found Him to be a frail and mortal man ; and in the first 



468 THE PROCESS TRANSFIGURES 

shock of the discovery they forsook Him and fled from their 
own past beliefs. But these beliefs were not so easily 
renounced ; they had begotten hopes too precious to be 
abandoned even at the bidding of fate ; they were endeared 
by affections too tender to die in the presence of disaster. 
And so while experience tempted the disciples to acquies- 
cence in the accomplished, which was but the end that Nature 
has in store for all, the imagination and the heart pleaded 
for another and more splendid issue. If the death was not to 
extinguish Jesus, He must be made to transfigure it, and 
change it into something quite other than the lot common to 
mortal men. This was the supreme achievement and victory 
of faith, which could not cease to regard Jesus as the Messiah, 
but could do a sublimer thing — invest Him and His death 
with eternal significance. The vision that created the belief 
in the resurrection made this transfiguration possible ; yet the 
one was a harder and slower process than the other. All 
at once, as is the way of visions, the resurrection became a 
credited fact, which the visionaries on every possible occasion 
affirmed that they themselves had witnessed ; but the death 
had come in an inexplicable, accidental, violent mode. So 
the one was conceived as God's action, but the other as 
man's. God had raised Him from the dead, but it was 
by wicked hands that He had been " taken, crucified, and 
slain." * The Jews had " killed the Prince of Life," demand- 
ing His death even when Pilate " was determined to let Him 
go." 2 But this crude theory could not long endure, for if 
" wicked hands " could prevail once, why not again and 
finally? So a second stage is marked by the acceptance of 
the customary Jewish explanation of the detested inevitable 
— it was the Will of God. While Herod and Pontius Pilate, 
the people of Rome and of Israel had appeared to act, 
the real Actor had been God ; they only did what the hand 
and counsel of God had determined before to be done. 3 
1 Acts i. 23. 2 lb. iii. 13-15. 8 lb. iv. 27, 28. 



THE PERSON AND THE DEATH 469 

But this position had too little reason in it to satisfy the 
imaginative intellect of the young society. It read with new 
eyes the Old Testament, found that Isaiah's servant of God 
was a sufferer for human sin, and all his attributes and experi- 
ences were forthwith ascribed to Jesus. 1 As this sufferer was 
" led like a lamb to the slaughter," so Jesus became "the Lamb 
of God," with all the sacrificial ideas of Judaism aggregated 
round His person and His death. The process once begun, 
needed for its completion only a constructive genius, and 
instead of one such, three soon appeared : Paul, who argued 
that Jesus as the crucified Christ was both the fulfilment and 
the abolition of the law ; the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, who made Jesus and His sufferings the antitype 
which had their type in the elaborate ritual and worship of the 
old economy ; and John, who found in the person, history, 
and death of our Lord the means by which the world was 
illumined and redeemed. And so by a perfectly natural, yet 
purely mythical and imaginative process, His death was 
transfigured from the last calamity of a blameless life to the 
act of grace by which God saved the world. 

But this theory, however ingenious and plausible, has three 
great defects : it lacks proof, it is intrinsically improbable, 
and it fails to explain the facts, (i.) Its proofs are drawn from 
sources which its advocates have in other connexions, and for 
what they deemed adequate reasons, discredited. It is not 
open to the same criticism to prove by analysis at one time 
the early speeches in the Acts to be late compositions, and at 
another to use them as authentic evidence for the oldest 
Christian beliefs. And here the most primitive tradition is 
specially explicit. When Paul states that it pleased God to 
reveal His Son in me, 2 and that he preached "first of all that 
which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins, 
according to the Scriptures," 3 he can only mean that at the 
moment of his conversion the belief had been not simply 

1 Acts viii. 30-35. 2 Gal. i. 16. 8 1 Cor. xv. 3. 



470 MYTHOLOGY MUST EXPLAIN 

formulated, but elaborated into a system in harmony with the 
Old Testament, (ii.) As to the intrinsic improbabilities, we 
have to consider both the men and the theory ; it was a 
belief of stupendous originality ; they were persons of no 
intellectual attainments and small inventive faculty. So far 
as the Gospels enable us to judge, they were curiously 
deficient in imagination, and of timid understanding. They 
were remarkable for their inability to draw obvious con- 
clusions, to transcend the commonplace, and comprehend 
the unfamiliar, or find a rational reason for the extraordinary. 
Such men might dream dreams and see visions, but to invent 
an absolutely novel intellectual conception which was to 
change man's view of all things Divine and human, was surely 
a feat beyond them, (iii.) And the improbabilities involve the 
inadequacy of the theory ; it makes Christ, with all He has 
accomplished, not simply the creation of accident, but it also 
turns the beliefs and the religion which have so governed the 
course of history into phantoms of the rude and sensuous 
imagination. 

2. But the mythical theory as here applied offends against 
certain of the laws which govern human development. It will 
be enough if three of these be here noticed. 

(a) The concrete and historical, or the imaginative and the 
mythical stage of thought, in both the personal and the col- 
lective life, precedes the abstract and the speculative, or the 
dialectical and logical. In every society, as in every person, 
the order or succession of mental states is this : the imagina- 
ation which loves the personal is active and creative earlier 
than the reason which loves the metaphysical. When mind 
is fresh and passion strong and the light of love looks 
through the eyes upon wonders the sobered understanding 
can never see, the mythical fancy has its creative hour, and 
weaves for its hero a history which corresponds to its own 
mood rather than to his achievements. But when ex- 
perience has subdued emotion and damped the heats of 



NOT HISTORY BUT THOUGHT 471 

youth, thought awakens, asks for reasons, and begins to 
speculate about the forms and shadows which looked so 
beautiful and so substantial in the vision the fancy made. 
Criticism, in its impulsive and wayward youth, learned this 
law from philosophy, and, assuming the Gospels to be the 
oldest documents, analyzed them as works of the mythical 
imagination, which had, out of a few mean facts, unconsciously 
created all their pomp of miracle and mystery. But it was 
soon discovered that the oldest Christian literature was not 
history but philosophy, — speculation as to Christ, not narrative 
concerning Jesus. While miracles, as single acts, have in this 
dialectical literature, if we may so name it, no place, yet in 
their stead, filling the whole space, stands a person so mira- 
culous that in His presence the most miraculous narratives 
are subdued to tame prose. There was no doubt imagination 
in the dialectic, for simply from the point of view of its 
marvellous vision backward into history, forward into the 
future with its infinite possibilities of good, upward into the 
mysteries we denote by the term Godhead or God, and down- 
ward into the nature which we name man, — so compounded 
of the divine and the demoniac, yet so continually riven 
asunder by their strife — the speculative structure we owe to 
Paul stands for its imaginative qualities foremost among the 
dialectical creations of the world. But this only adds to 
the significance of the fact here emphasized : brief as is the 
period which divided the oldest Pauline Epistles from the 
death of Jesus, there has yet grown up in the interval not a 
mythological but an intellectual system, — the conception of 
a Person who is at once the interpreter of God and the in- 
terpretation of man, the centre of the finely articulated 
system which has drawn into its diamond network the whole 
order of history and all the forces which work for or against 
the good which is its end. And this conception cannot be 
explained as due to a blind mythical impulse acted on by a 
reminiscent and regretful love, which sought compensation 



472 MYTHOLOGY AS UNCONSCIOUS POETRY 

for the loss of the loved by the eminence of its imaginative 
creations ; for the man who formulates and articulates it did 
not know Jesus, and so was without the ardour of personal 
love and the sense of personal loss. 

(/3) A second law regulative of the formation and inter- 
pretation of mythical material is this : Since speculation is 
later than history, it is the historical incident or event that it 
most loves to construe. Mythology is the unconscious poetry 
of nature and history ; while philosophy is the attempt of the 
conscious reason to translate the products of the unconscious 
imagination into rational theory. But what is peculiar in this 
case is that the dialectical explication is concerned with the 
Person and not with the history. It would not have been 
so extraordinary if the dialectical construction had begun 
after the lapse of a century or more, i.e., when His figure 
had grown nebulous and the exaggerative fancy had played 
its wizard tricks with His memory. Without the exuberant 
mythology which hides Buddha so completely from the eye 
of the historical inquirer, the Buddhist schools would have 
been deprived of the material out of which they have woven 
their wonderful metaphysical dreams. Without the Persian 
mind and imagination, looking through a medium of glori- 
fying legend at the figure which had moved across the 
Arabian desert some generations before, we should never 
have had those mystic speculations as to the prophet, his 
word and family and heirs, which go so far to redeem Islam 
from bondage to the letter that killeth. Not till men had 
ceased to believe that Greek mythology was true, or that 
the Greek gods could be what it said they were, did they 
attempt its speculative interpretation ; and ask, whether it 
was misunderstood history or hidden wisdom, natural science 
or moral truth disguised in allegory. But here, before the 
myth has had time to rise, or the legend to become current, 
or the imagination to transmute base metal into fine gold, 
the speculative change has been not simply begun but ac- 






SPEAKS A LIVING LANGUAGE 473 

complished. In other words, it is not Jesus in His environ- 
ment of miracle who is interpreted, but it is the Person in 
His specially historical and religious, ethical and intellectual, 
significance. The idea seeks to represent and explicate 
Himself, not His acts and the incidents of His career. 

(7) The third law we wish to note is this : between the 
speculative construction and the soil on which it grows 
there must be close and intimate agreement. But in this 
case the remarkable thing is that the plant seems so totally 
alien to the soil on which it sprouted and grew. While 
Paul is an intensely Jewish thinker, and uses forms of 
thought, figures of speech, and methods of interpretation 
which he must have learned in the Jewish schools, the idea 
which he elaborates is the very contradiction of what he must 
there have been trained to believe. Our first impulse, when we 
come to understand the doctrine of the Person, is to seek 
for hints or intimations of it in the Old Testament, and 
these have been, both by apologetic and exegetical theology, 
most deftly and exhaustively handled. But the idea has 
no real parallel in the Jewish Scriptures, for they may be 
said never to have transcended the notion that God and man 
formed an absolute antithesis. The affinities of the idea 
appear rather to be with Greek religion. Indeed, were we 
writing of a process which that religion recognizes, we might 
describe it as one of apotheosis. But the term is inapplic- 
able here for two reasons : 

(i.) The process happens under a religion which knew 
nothing of gods who begot men or men who became gods. It 
was a monotheism, and the man who first shows us the com- 
pleted process not only never at any moment abandoned in 
the smallest degree this faith, but he became by the change 
he effected in its terms its most victorious expositor and 
missionary. Indeed, it is one of the most remarkable facts 
in this most curious history — and were we dealing with an 
abstract question we should call the position an incredible 



474 IDEA NOT A DEIFICATORY PROCESS 

paradox — that the idea of the Son of God who was equal 
with God, though it seemed most seriously to threaten the 
divine unity, has yet been the supreme means of its conserva- 
tion. And this relation to the idea of one God makes the 
Christian incarnation a belief at once singular and original. 
In Greece apotheosis meant for both gods and men such a 
community of origin and such a communicability of nature 
and status, that the process of descent from the gods or 
ascent into their society was in the strictest sense natural and 
normal. But in Israel eternity was the attribute of God and 
mortality of man, and so, because of the distinction in their 
natures, Deity could not be communicated to man or 
humanity to God. And as a curious but instructive fact this 
difference was not so much reduced as emphasized by the 
place accorded to Christ. 

(ii.) He is not conceived as the subject of a deificatory 
process — indeed, both term and idea would have been ab- 
horrent to the apostolic writers, who thought that God was as 
incapable of change as of any beginning of being. Hence 
they would not have described as divine any one they did 
not believe to be essentially God ; and so they never repre- 
sent Christ as attaining Deity or achieving a rank which He 
had not known before. This makes their idea a contrast 
rather than a parallel to those transmutations of gods into 
men and men into gods so common in the Greek, the Latin, 
and the Hindu mythologies. 

§ IV. The Historical Source of the Idea 

I. The idea seems thus to be too speculative and too 
original to be explained by a theory which places the imagin- 
ation before the reason, postulates as already existing the 
forms to be used, and requires for their growth into organic 
unity a congenial soil and a suitable environment. How, 
then, are we to conceive the genesis of this common and 



ITS SOURCE THE MIND OF CHRIST 475 

creative idea of the New Testament, this constitutive and 
regulative idea of the Church ? Its source must have been 
one acknowledged and revered by all tendencies and all 
parties, for only so can their agreement in this and their 
difference in other respects be understood. And this source 
could be but one : the mind of Christ. His teaching can 
explain the rise, the forms, and the contents of the Apostolic 
literature, but this literature could never explain how His 
teaching came to be. Postulate His mind, and we may 
derive from it the Apostolic thought ; but postulate this 
thought, and we could never deduce from it His mind and 
history. In other words, He is the historical antecedent and 
the logical premiss of the Epistles, and it is open to no 
intellectual strategy to invert or change their relations. In 
His teaching lie principles they develop, but also elements 
they miss or misconceive. Yet it is exactly as regards His 
person that the connexion is most close and consistent, the 
development most precise and logical. He speaks of Him- 
self as the Son who alone knows and alone can reveal the 
Father ; and to this idea Paul traces His conversion, in it 
Hebrews finds the constitutive truth of the Christian religion, 1 
Peter the quality by which the Christian Deity may best be 
defined, 2 the Apocalypse the image that makes the Head 
of the Church most sovereign, 3 and John the name he most 
loves to use. 4 Jesus speaks of the Messiah as Son of David, 5 
so does Paul. 6 " The Son of Man " of the Gospels appears 
nowhere in the Epistles, but its interpretative equivalents, 
"the second Adam" and "the second man," are determinative 
of the Pauline thought. 7 The best commentary on the 
claim that He had come to fulfil the law and the prophets 
is Hebrews ; the most impressive representations of His 
functions as Redeemer and Judge are to be found in the 

1 i. 1. 2 i, 2, 3. 3 ii. 18. 

4 1 John i. 3 ; iv. 9, 14, 15. 5 Mark xii. 35-37. 

6 Rom. i. 3. 7 1 Cor. xv. 45-47. 



476 THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PERSON 

Apocalypse. It has been argued that there are differences 
between His and the Apostolic idea ; of course there are, 
but these are notes more of continuity and independence 
than of contradiction and isolation. Wendt argues 1 that 
the conception of the personal and heavenly pre-existence 
distinguishes the Pauline idea from Christ's ; and Gloatz 2 well 
replies to him that this can be maintained only by one who 
excludes all reference to the discourses in John and places 
the most prosaic interpretation on some of the most charac- 
teristic Synoptic sayings. If, then, we view the idea as the 
creation of Jesus Himself, the expression of His own con- 
sciousness touching His own being, the Apostolic literature, 
thought and life may be explained ; but if we seek for it 
some alien and accidental source, bewilderment — literary, 
historical and biographical — will be the sure result. 

2. We have yet to show how the idea as to the Person of 
Christ created the Christian religion. It is enough that we 
repeat here, that that religion is not built upon faith in 
Jesus of Nazareth, but upon the belief that He was the 
Christ, the Son of the living God. Without this belief the 
religion could have had no existence ; the moment it lived 
the religion began to be. And the process of interpreta- 
tion was a creative process ; every stage in the evolution 
of the thought marked a stage in the realization of the 
religion. In the synoptic Gospels, we have what may be 
termed the personal and subjective religion of Jesus, i.e. the 
modes under which He conceived His relation to God and 
fulfilled His duties towards man ; but had they stood alone, 
we should have had only one picture the more of the ideal 
man, a Being to admire and imitate, not to worship and 
obey. In the apostolical Epistles the Person is interpreted 
in relation to the religion, and as the interpretation proceeds 

1 Die Lehre des Paulus verglichen mit der Lehre Jesu, p. 45. 

2 "Zur Vergleichung der Lehre des Paulus mit der Jesu." Stud. u. 
Krit. 1895, pp. 778 and 792-794. 



IS THE CREATION OF THE RELIGION 477 

the religion becomes more clearly defined, distinct in quality, 
real in character, absolute in authority. We see it become, 
first, different from Judaism, next independent of it, then ab- 
sorbent of all that was permanent in it as well as in other 
religions, and, finally, when Christ is conceived in His divine 
dignity and pre-eminence, the religion appears as the alone 
true, as universal in its unity as the one God in His sole 
sovereignty. In the Fourth Gospel a final step is taken : this 
interpreted Person is made the key at once to the history of 
Jesus and to the purposes and the ends of God alike in crea- 
tion and in redemption. By this means what was actual and 
personal is wedded to what is ideal and universal, and each 
is seen to have been a necessary factor of the concrete result. 
Without the historical Person the ideal would never have ex- 
isted ; but without the ideal the historical would never have 
been the source of a universal religion. The historical Person 
may be described as the primordial and creative or parent 
form. He defined the religion as essentially ethical, by exhibit- 
ing the type of man and character it was intended to realize. 
Men were to be as He was — sons of God ; as gracious and 
beneficent, as blameless and gentle, as faithful and brotherly 
towards men ; and as reverent and lowly, as pure and 
obedient, as sinless and holy, towards God. And the religion 
was to live and grow in the manner He instituted — by making 
disciples, by creating, through the methods of fellowship and 
friendship, out of the evil and the neglected, the publicans and 
the sinners, a society of the like-minded — men who loved God 
supremely, and their neighbours as themselves. Without 
the historical Person we should never have known what the 
religion ought to be, the sort of man it conceived as accept- 
able to God, the kind of worship it wished to cultivate, the 
mode in which it proposed to change the old order, and the 
new society it desired to form. He thus, as it were, deter- 
mined the quality and inner essence of His religion, fixing for 
ever its special character and peculiar type. But if the his- 



478 INCARNATION EPITOME AND MIRROR 

torical Person had stood alone, i.e. if He had been conceived 
and regarded as a common man, though a man of rare dignity 
and a teacher of pre-eminent power, we might have had a 
school, a sect, or a philosophy, but we could not have had a 
religion. What made the religion was the significance His 
Person had for thought, the way in which it lived to faith, the 
mode in which it interpreted to reason God and the universe, 
man and history. It was this that saved the disciples from 
becoming the sect of the Nazarenes, and made them into the 
Catholic Church. It is by virtue of this idea that we have the 
Christian religion, and that it has lived and reigned from the 
moment of its birth till now. 

3. But this analysis of the historical relations existing between 
the idea of Christ's person and the creation of the Christian 
religion has introduced us to a region at once of speculation 
and criticism. It is not enough to see that in the period of 
formation every change in the idea of the Person was attended 
by a parallel modification or transformation in the religion ; it 
is necessary that we inquire whether the idea be in itself essen- 
tial to religion, whether it has behaved in it like an arbitrary 
creation of religious emotion, or like a doctrine that is all the 
more rational to human thought that it so speaks concerning 
the mysteries of God. We confess, indeed, that the person of 
Christ is a stupendous miracle, in the proper sense the sole 
miracle of time. In it the mystery of being is epitomized and 
externalized. For there is no problem raised by the incarna- 
tion which is not raised in an acuter and less soluble form 
by creation, whether considered as an event in time or as an 
existence in space. If creation be an event or process, it is 
something which had a beginning, and in however remote a 
past the beginning may be placed, yet behind it stands a 
silent eternity ; and though reason may ask for ever what was 
before the creative process began, what caused it to begin, and 
when was the beginning, it will for ever ask in vain. Again, 
if creation be conceived as being in space, then it is from its 



OF ALL THE MYSTERIES OF BEING 479 

very nature existence within bounds ; but how can the same 
space hold at once bounded and boundless Being ? How 
can any Being be boundless if once He be confronted by the 
bounded ? Can there be any room in a universe that knows 
the finite for the Infinite ? Does not limited existence, so far 
forth as real, cancel the very possibility of the unlimited ? In 
short, there is no problem raised by the idea of God manifest 
in the flesh as to the relation of the divine nature to the 
human in the unity of one person, or as to the historical 
origin of such a relation, i.e. its beginning in time ; or as to 
the action of the limited manhood on the illimitable Godhood, 
which is not equally raised by the inter-relations of God and 
nature. For in a perfectly real sense creation is incarnation ; 
nature is the body of the infinite Spirit, the organism which 
the divine thought has articulated and filled with the breath 
of life. But while the problems are analogous, the facte rs 
which promise solution are more potent in the case of the 
incarnation than of creation. For in nature the idea of God 
demands for its expression no more than physical and logical 
categories, but in Christ the categories become rational, 
ethical, emotional, i.e. they involve personal qualities and rela- 
tions rather than mere cosmical modes and energies. And 
so, by investing God with a higher degree of reality and 
higher qualities of being, it makes all His attributes and rela- 
tions more actual, all His actions and ways more intelligible 
and real. 






CHAPTER III 

THE DEATH OF CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN WORSHIP 

THE new beliefs created by the interpretation of the per- 
son constituted the Christian religion on its ideal side ; 
but to become actual it needed a worship, or the means of 
expressing and cultivating reverence and of inculcating 
piety and obedience. Worship is a function at once individual 
and social, not possible in the individual without the influences 
that make men devout, or in society without agencies that 
organize and control. The relation which the ideal and the 
institutional or consuetudinary elements in a religion sustain 
to each other, has been already indicated 1 ; and we only need 
to add here that the very law which compels the idea to ex- 
press itself in the institution and the institution to justify itself 
by means of the idea, forces upon them a policy of mutual ad- 
justment. Neither can healthily separate from the other. The 
reasoned idea without the worship is theology ; the worship 
without any reasoned idea is superstition ; but the two in 
wholesome and corporate union make religion. What theo- 
logy is to the speculative reason, worship is to the popular 
consciousness, a form under which deity is conceived and 
described. Each is a language which articulates some 
governing religious idea ; and of these two languages worship, 
as the more frankly symbolical, addresses the imagination 
through several senses at once, and is, therefore, the less 
capable of being contradicted, while also the less sensitive to 

1 Ante, pp. 202-203, 238-240. 

480 



WORSHIP AS A LANGUAGE 481 

criticism. Its acts and observances may from constant repe- 
tition grow as stale as any common task, yet even where most 
stale they can lift the susceptible man out of and above him- 
self till he feels as if he and God had joined hands and stood 
face to face. If indeed God be conceived to stand but a few 
degrees above man — and this never happens without bringing 
Him in some respects several degrees below him — the worship 
will easily fulfil its function, though it will signify little when 
fulfilled ; but the higher and purer the conception of God is, 
the more difficult and the more necessary the worship be- 
comes. For while it enables religion to overcome the in- 
capacities of human nature, and by incorporating its ideals in 
persons to bring about their realization in society and history ; 
yet it involves as a dangerous possibility that the observance 
or the custom may prove stronger than the idea. And if it 
does, God will be lowered rather than man uplifted. Specu- 
lation may refine thought, but this matters little if God be 
coarsened and debased by the means taken to approach and 
please Him. And in the long run worship is more powerful 
than speculation, for while the one may entertain the reason 
of the few, the other by its appeal to the imagination of the 
many commands the conscience and regulates the life. 

§ I. Christ as Idea and as Institution 

1. Now this is the point at which the founders of the Chris- 
tian religion performed their most original and creative act. 
They so made a person into an institution, a mode and way 
of worship which at once exalted God and dignified man, as 
to make the religion incapable of being localized. They acted 
without conscious design, but in obedience to an instinct or 
experience which governed their thought ; and their action 
changed the event which threatened their faith with extinction 
into the condition of its immortality. There is no other re- 
ligion which has a crucified or slain person as the sole and suf- 

P.C.R. 3 1 



482 CHRIST AS THE ONLY SACRIFICE FOR SIN 

ficient medium through which God approaches man and man 
approaches God. This surprised ancient as it has perplexed 
modern thought, but, considered simply as a matter of fact, 
without the Cross the religion could not have been. Christ 
is in the apostolical records conceived as a Saviour who 
saves by the sacrifice of Himself, as " the Lamb of God," with- 
out blemish and without spot, " slain from the foundation of 
the world," yet offered at the end of the ages that He might 
redeem men by His precious blood. 1 " He is our passover 
sacrificed for us," 2 " whom God set forth as a propitiatory " 
(person), in order that He might " be just and the justifier of 
him who is of the faith of Jesus." 3 This mode of conceiving 
His death is so integral alike to the history and thought of the 
New Testament as to deserve to be termed its organizing 
idea, but it is so singular as to be without any parallel in the 
ideas and customs either of those natural religions which make 
most of sacrifice, 4 or of those which we are accustomed to 
compare as historical with the Christian. Thus to Israel Moses 
was a lawgiver who commanded and threatened, exacting 
obedience by the hope of reward or the fear of punishment, 
but he was never conceived as one who "appeared to put away 
sin by the sacrifice of himself." Confucius is a sage whose 
authority is based on his wisdom, or his power in revealing 
to persons and states the secret of a happy life ; but death, 
whether his own or another's, is to him too great a mystery to 
be understood ; the wise man can only sit dumb before it. 
Mohammed is a prophet who denounces hell to the disobedient 

1 John i. 29 ; Rev. xiii. 8 ; 1 Peter i. 19 ; Heb. ix. 26. 

2 1 Cor. v. 7. 3 Rom. iii. 25, 26. 

4 This is not the place to examine Dr. Frazer's learned and ingenious 
argument to the contrary. {Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol. iii. pp. 186 ff.) 
His discussion of this subject seems to me a conspicuous example of con- 
scientious but uncritical learning. He mistakes coincidence in things 
accidental for contact and causation in things essential, and forgets that 
there is nothing so easy as to prove the former, but nothing, when it has 
been proved, so entirely insignificant as regards the latter. 



IS AN IDEA WITHOUT A PARALLEL 483 

and promises heaven to the faithful ; but he is more distin- 
guished by the will to inflict suffering than by the heart to 
endure it, even where it may bring good to others. Buddha 
is the nearest approach to Christ ; he makes the great renun- 
ciation, surrendering regal might and right and wealth for 
poverty and humiliation, and he makes an end of the ritual, 
the sacrifices, the priesthood, and the various deities of 
Brahmanism. For this reason his people revere him, love 
him, and seek to follow in his footsteps. But here the similar- 
ities are superficial, while the differences are radical, (i.) 
Buddha is a pessimist ; he does not love life, for to him being 
is suffering, and his desire is to escape from sorrow by escap- 
ing from existence. But Christ is never a pessimist ; His very 
passion is the expression of a splendid optimism, the belief that 
existence is so good that it ought not to be lost but held fast 
and rescued, and that when purged from the accident of sin it 
will become altogether lovely, a thing to be wholly desired, 
(ii.) Buddha is a leader, a man to be followed and imitated ; 
what he did men must do that they may partake of his illu- 
mination and enter into his rest. But what Christ does no 
other person can do. He offers Himself a Sacrifice that He 
may win eternal redemption for men. (iii.) Buddha is an 
Indian ascetic, whose highest work is to break the bonds 
of life and all the forces which make for its continuance and 
for the social perfecting of the race. But Christ is in the 
strict sense a Redeemer and a Sacrifice, one whose sorrow is 
curative, who restores our nature to personal and social health, 
that it may attain individual and collective happiness, per- 
sonal and general immortality, (iv.) The basis of Buddha's 
salvation is a metaphysical nihilism. In a world without God 
and immortality, but crowded with men of teachable moral 
natures, redemption is not difficult, instruction can accomplish 
it, the meditation which found the way can be followed until 
the goal is reached. But in a world where God cannot cease to 
be pure and man cannot will himself out of existence, to make 



484 THE DEATH INTERPRETED IN THE TERMS 

the guilty man fit to be reconciled with the pure and eternal 
God is a work which may well cause suffering to the holiest 
and most blessed Being. The world which Christ redeems is 
one of infinite reality, man being in his own degree as real as 
God. The Passion, then, has a singular character and unique 
worth ; it stands alone, without any parallel in the other re- 
ligions of history. Why it holds the place it does, and what 
it does in that place, are the questions we have now to discuss. 
2. What here concerns us, then, is not the doctrine as to 
the death of Christ, but its function in the Christian religion. 
How doctrine and function differ yet coincide we may see as 
we proceed ; but at present we note that any critical discus- 
sion as to the process which made His death the basis of our 
redemption, usually starts with Paul and the need he felt to 
resolve the antithesis presented by the fact of the Cross to his 
idea of the Messiah. Now this procedure is for two reasons 
unhistorical : (i.) Paul tells us that he did not invent the 
belief, but found it in possession. 1 (ii.) Jesus was the his- 
torical source of the idea ; 2 though experience and history 
were needed to make His meaning plain. The apostolical 
experience was a kind of educational dialectic, and its 
environment was like a school where the intellect was ex- 
ercised by means of theses and antitheses. The school had, 
as it were, two departments or sides, the sacerdotal and 
rabbinical, or a school for priests and a school for scribes. 
The home of the one was the Temple, the home of the 
other was the Synagogue. Both were religious, though in 
a totally different sense : in the one case the religion was 
more personal, more rooted in conviction, concerned with 
thought and the government of life ; in the other case the 
religion was more collective, consisted more in ritual and 
the regulation of worship, the acts which expressed it and 
the persons who were its celebrants. Both schools were 

1 Ante, p. 469. 2 Ante, pp. 395-431) cf. 475- 



OF THE TEMPLE AND THE SYNAGOGUE 485 

concerned with Deity, though under distinct aspects and in 
contrasted relations. The God who occupied the Temple 
was an object of worship ; the God who was studied in the 
Synagogue was the Giver of the law. The law had indeed 
created both the Temple and the Synagogue, but the law 
did not mean to the two Schools exactly the same thing. 
To the one it signified the Levitical legislation, which had 
instituted the priesthood, organized and regulated its ministry, 
described and sanctioned its sacrifices ; to the other it signified 
the ethical precepts and the ceremonial customs which gave 
to the State its theocratic character and to the individual the 
rules which governed his conduct. These two schools appear 
in the apostolical writings, and their very different tempers 
are represented by the sects described in the historical books. 
Thus in Hebrews the term has its distinctly Levitical mean- 
ing : " the law appointed men high priests " ; 1 priests " offer 
gifts according to the law " ; 2 " according to the law all 
things are cleansed with blood," 3 and its sacrifices are " a 
shadow of good things to come." 4 But in Paul, though the 
term has an almost indescribable variety of meanings, yet its 
prevailing sense is the rabbinical, the law is the commandment 
which enjoins or forbids, which says " Thou shalt do this " or 
" Thou shalt not do that," promising reward to the obedient, 
threatening punishment to the transgressor. 5 Now both 
these types or schools of thought and policy affected in the 
way of antithesis the Christian synthesis ; Christ appears in 
contrast to the one as the eternal Priest and Sacrifice, and to 
the other as the Redeemer of man from the law which killed, 
and the Bringer of the Grace which gave life. And it is 
because He so appears that we can say that the function 
which apostolic thought assigns to His death can be better 
described as an institution than as a doctrine. 



1 vii. 28. 2 viii. 4. 3 xi. 22. 4 xi. 

5 Cf. Rom. ii. 12, 17-27 ; vii. 7, 12, et passim. 



486 RELIGION IN THE TEMPLE 

§ II. The Levitical Legislation and the Christian Idea 

I. The position here may be thus stated : Christ took the 
place in the new religion which the Temple had held in the 
old, and as a single Sacrifice and eternal Priest He super- 
seded the multitudinous sacrifices and priests who had stood 
and mediated between God and Man. The substitution was 
a revolution, for the Temple was not a mere incident or 
aspect of the religion, but the symbol of man's whole 
conscious and expressed relation to the Deity. It typified, 
therefore, (i.) the presence and accessibility of God, His abode 
among His people, His desire to commune with them, to 
speak to them and to hear their speech, (ii.) The duty of His 
people to worship Him. He was their God and they were 
His people, and their right to the Temple meant their 
freedom of access to Him. (iii.) This limitation involved on 
their part a double relation to Him, a collective and a 
personal. The collective was primary, for the man must 
be of Israel before he could worship Israel's God ; but the 
personal, though secondary, was essential, for the man who 
was an Israelite knew God and was known of Him. (iv.) The 
worship prescribed was such as became the character of 
God and expressed the state of man. The character of God 
was holy, the state of man was sinful, and the worship was de- 
signed to reconcile the holy God to the sinful man. (v.) Since 
man was sinful he could not come directly into the presence 
of the Holy, but needed a representative to stand before the 
Lord and speak in his name and on his behalf; hence came 
the priest. And since he had sins to confess and be for- 
given as well as favours to ask or acknowledge, he could 
not allow the priest to enter the Divine presence empty- 
handed, but supplied him with the blood of atonement drawn 
from the sacrificial victim, or with the gifts which his grati- 
tude prompted, (vi.) The stability of the Temple and the 
continuance of the worship signified that the intercourse was 



AND IN THE SYNAGOGUE 487 

constant. The people obeyed God's voice, and He heard 
their prayers. 

2. The Temple, then, stood for an ideal of worship regulated 
by the law, whose seat was not the Synagogue or school, but 
the national sanctuary ; whose ministers were not Scribes or 
rabbis, but priests and Levites ; whose acts were not reading 
and preaching, but sacrificing and sprinkling of blood. It 
signified a legislation not so much recorded in books as in- 
corporated in a living order. The Synagogue was provincial 
and sectarian, but the Temple was metropolitan and collec- 
tive ; the one spoke of difference, but the other was sacred to 
the unities of family and faith. In the Synagogue a man 
might be a Latin or a Greek, a Cilician or an Alexandrian, 
a pupil of Hillel or of Shammai ; but in the Tenaple he knew 
himself to be a son of Abraham, an Israelite, who believed 
Jehovah alone to be God and who observed the customs of 
the fathers. Dispersion might occasion an enlarged use of 
the Synagogue, but it also increased the significance and the 
fascination of the Temple. The motherland is to the imagin- 
ation of the colonist transfigured by a romance which the 
eye accustomed to the hard realities of the life within it 
does not see ; and so he who dwelt far from Zion idealized 
the holy place, as he did not who sat in its lengthening 
shadow and watched the jealousies and plottings of its sons. 
It is almost certain that the man who wrote the Epistle to 
the Hebrews and the men who received it were all the more 
under the spell of the ideal that they knew so little of the 
actual Temple and its ways. But to all, whether near or 
remote, it was the living heart of the religion, an epitome of 
the people and their history. No other appeal to the present 
was so irresistible because none so perfectly embodied the past. 
In its earliest and simplest form, as the tabernacle which 
went with the fathers through the wilderness led them into 
the promised land, and helped them to build their cities 
and their state, it spoke of the God who had called them out 



488 THE TEMPLE IN ISRAEL 

of Egypt, chosen them out of all the nations of the earth 
to be the people of His covenant and His grace. And when 
the kings came David felt it a reproach that he should dwell 
in a house of cedar, " while God still dwelt within curtains " ; x 
and so his ambition was to be found worthy to build Him 
a house. This though denied to David was granted to 
Solomon, whose wisdom designed, whose power erected, 
whose wealth adorned the first and stateliest temple. In 
the most glorious of all prophetic visions Isaiah had beheld 
it filled with the train of the Lord ; in the most pathetic of 
all prophetic histories Jeremiah had described the anarchy 
and desolation in which it and the state alike perished. 
Yet towards the Temple the Exiles in Babylon did not cease 
to turn tearful and longing eyes, and Ezekiel had pictured it 
springing anew from its ashes in splendid yet measured 
proportions, and opening its courts to resurgent and restored 
Israel. 3 They came back a peeled 3 and suffering remnant, 
who built the house of God amid poverty and in the face of 
dangers unspeakable, yet cheered by the visions of the later 
Isaiah and the mighty music of his speech ; and so they 
crowned the second Temple with a glory which the first had 
never known. What began in weakness lived in power, and 
gathered to it the sublimest memories of the people. Within 
it the Levitical legislation and ritual were realized ; its 
courts had been built and its sacrifices were offered accord- 
ing to the law ; psalms written in praise of God and for 
His service were sung in its worship ; it was the symbol of 
His name, the seat of His visible presence, the home where 
He showed Himself to His people, conversed with them, and 
proved Himself to be their God. Its priests were sons of Aaron, 
who still seemed fragrant with the oil that had consecrated 

1 2 Sam. vii. 2. 2 Ante, pp. 251-253. 

3 Isaiah xviii. 2, 7, A.V. ; cf. Milton, P.R. iv. 136. Speaking of the 
Romans "who conquered well but governed ill," " Peeling their provinces, 
exhausted all by lust and rapine." 



AS IDEAL AND AS REALITY 489 

him, and who, all the more that they were vowed to God, 
had played the part of heroes and taught the people how 
to win freedom by braving battle and enduring death. The 
Temple thus made an irresistible appeal to the imagination ; 
the Jew, wherever he lived or whatever language he spoke, 
ceased the moment he stood within it to feel as if he were 
an alien, and became consciously one of God's elect, who 
could speak to God and hear God speaking to him. With- 
out it or otherwise than through it he could not think of 
his religion, and without his religion where were the Jew ? 
Even when the Temple had fallen, he could not believe that 
it had perished ; for the priestly race survived, and so long 
as it did not die the hope lived that Israel would yet praise 
God in the midst of the holy city. 

3. Now the Apostles were Jews who thought in the 
manner of their race, yet as regards the Temple and its 
worship they had been forced to think otherwise than their 
race thought. Experience had made them conscious of the 
contradiction between its actual state and its ideal signi- 
ficance. They knew that it was the priests and not the 
Pharisees who had crucified Jesus ; that up to the entry into 
Jerusalem the latter had been His chief opponents, but from 
then onwards the former had become His irreconcilable 
antagonists ; and that while the rabbis had argued, the priests, 
who were a ruling as well as a sacred caste, had acted, 
and acted, as rulers will, with more regard for order than 
for right. It was in the court of the high priest that 
counsel was taken against Jesus. 1 He is betrayed to " the 
chief priests." 2 They send the multitude who seize Him. 3 
He is conducted to the palace of the high priest, 4 where He 
is tried and declared guilty of blasphemy. 5 " The chief 
priests " bind Him, deliver Him up to Pilate, accuse Him, 

1 Matt. xxvi. 3, 4. 2 Matt. xxvi. 15 ; Luke xxii. 4. 

s Matt. xxvi. 47 ; Mark xix 43 ; Luke xxii. 50. 

4 Matt. xxvi. 57 ; John xviii. 24. 5 Mark xiv. 63 ; Matt. xxvi. 65. 



490 THE PRIESTS AND THE PHARISEES 

demand His death, 1 and extort it from the hesitating 
governor. 2 They stiffen the purpose of Pilate by raising the 
cry, " Crucify Him," 3 and wish the cynical inscription " The 
King of the Jews " changed to the personal charge, " He said 
' I am the King of the Jews ' " ; 4 and while He is in agony 
they mock His impotence. 5 And they dealt with the 
disciples as they had dealt with Him. The " priests and the 
captain of the temple " are sore troubled because the Apostles 
preach Jesus. 6 The judges of Peter and John, on account 
of " the good deed done to the impotent man," are Annas 
and Caiaphas and " the kindred of the high priest." 7 It is 
the same persons who, being " filled with jealousy, laid hands 
on the Apostles, and put them in public ward," 8 and who 
charge them " not to teach in this Name." 9 While the 
priests seem to increase in vigilant severity 10 the Pharisees 
seem to become dubious, hesitant, double-minded, like men 
who temporize in action because they halt in thought. 11 
In the Synagogue, where the Pharisees reigned, the Apostles 
were allowed not only to sit but to speak and dispute ; 12 
but in the Temple, which the priests controlled, they were not 
permitted to worship, Paul's attempt to do so provoking the 
riot that led to his imprisonment and the appeal to Caesar. 13 
Exclusion from it was thus the sign and seal of their 
alienation from Israel, and forced upon them the questions, 
Why had it been built ? What was its function and pur- 
pose ? The question raised by the conflict of the local cult 
with the universal idea was as old as the prophets of Israel, 

1 Mark xvi. 5 ; Matt, xxvii. 1, 2, 11-14 ; Luke xxiii. 1-3. 

2 Luke xxiii. 13-19. 3 John xix. 6. * John xix. 21. 

5 Mark xv. 31. 6 Acts iv. 1, 2. 7 Acts iv. 5, 6, 23. 

8 Acts v. 17, 18. 9 Acts v. 28. 

10 Cf. vii. 1 ; ix. I ; xiii. 2 ; xxiv. 1. 

11 Cf. the attitude of Gamaliel (Acts v. 34-39) and the conduct of the 
Pharisees at the trial of Paul (xxiii. 6, 7). 

12 Acts ix. 20 ; xiii. 5, 14, 15 ; xiv. 1 ; xvii. 17 ; xviii. 4, 26. 

13 Acts xxi. 26-30. 






IN RELATION TO THE APOSTLES 491 

and as new as the sect of the Essenes, who forsook the Temple 
and cultivated piety in separateness and seclusion. Men of a 
Hellenistic temper, like Josephus, explained it as a mirror of 
the universe, while Philo found in it an allegory concerning 
the things sensible and things intelligible which made up his 
whole of being. Ideas of this order were not unknown to 
the earliest converts ; we see them struggling with the 
Christian problem in the mind of Stephen. He conceives 
the Temple as alien to monotheism ; l the universal God can- 
not be confined to a single place, the Builder of Nature to a 
house built by human hands. But though logic may prove 
that it is possible to worship anywhere a God who is every- 
where, yet there are deeper questions than any exercise in 
dialectics can solve. Are not the people more than the 
place ? Are all men equally fit and free to worship ? Do 
sin and guilt matter nothing to Deity? As He has no 
respect of persons is He also without respect for character? 
Are there no terms to be observed, no obstacles on man's 
part which call for a priest or other mediator? These 
questions the Hellenistic speech of Stephen did not touch, 
nor did the early Apostles think that they had any con- 
nexion with the person and death of Christ. In his earliest 
discourses Peter speaks of Jesus as having been crucified " by 
the hands of lawless men," 2 who had " killed the Prince of 
Life," 3 and "set themselves against the Lord and His 
Anointed," 4 " whom also they slew, hanging Him on a tree." 5 
In curious forgetfulness of what he had been taught he seems 
to have conceived the cross as the symbol of victorious evil, 
which was only defeated by the raising of Christ from the 
dead. But light came from an unexpected quarter ; the 
Ethiopian Eunuch put a question which effected the orienta- 
tion of the Apostolic mind : did the prophet describe 
himself or some other as a sheep led to the slaughter ? 6 In 

1 Acts vi. 14 ; vii. 46-50. 2 ii. 23. s iii. 14. 

5 x. 39. 6 viii. 30-35. 



492 THE LEVITICAL LEGISLATION 

this there was a fine fitness ; prophecy had created and 
organized the Hebrew Temple, preached the idea that made 
it necessary, declared against the local cults, urged the 
creation of a central sanctuary where the elect people 
could collectively meet the holy God, and offer Him a 
cleanlier and seemlier worship. But time had demonstrated 
how easy it was for an institution founded for the worship of 
God to supersede the God in whose honour it had been 
founded, to impose upon Him its own limitations, and invoke 
His authority to sanction and to sanctify its sins. And now 
the spirit of prophecy, reincarnated, substituted a person for 
a positive institution, a worship which knew no place and no 
sacred caste, for a worship which was bound to a special race 
and its peculiar customs. 

§111. The Levitical Categories interpret the Christian 

Idea 

I. Apostolic thought starts, then, from a positive belief, 
" Christ died for our sins," and proceeds to construe this 
"according to the Scriptures." If the books we now call the 
Old Testament had then canonical existence, they yet had 
not a uniform authority. The Sadducean priests believed 
strongly in the Levitical legislation, which they termed the 
law of Moses, for it was the charter of their privileges, the 
basis of their rights ; and their usage affected the apostolical 
literature, though with significant differences. Thus Paul 
never uses the terms priest or priesthood, but in Hebrews 
they occur thirty times. Paul speaks rarely, if at all, of 
sacrifices in the Levitical sense, but in Hebrews this sense 
was fundamental. The sacrificial idea was indeed too ger- 
mane to the Pauline mode of thought to be entirely ignored. 1 
And so he says, " For our passover has been sacrificed, even 

1 A. Ritschl {Rechfertigung u. Versbhnung, ii. pp. 1 61-163) argues 
against Richard Schmidt that Paul construes the death of Christ through 
the Old Testament idea of sacrifice. But he forgets that there are 



AND THE PAULINE THEOLOGY 493 

Christ " ; * but two things are here significant, (a) the pass- 
over was older than the Levitical system and independent 
of its priesthood ; and (/3) it was above anything in Judaism 
suggestive of the last supper and the passion. 2 Still it is 
used here to enforce a duty and not to define a doctrine. 
Since the lamb is already slain, the old leaven ought to be 
cast out, the house of the soul purged from its sin. A 
second illustrative usage occurs in Ephesians : " Even as 
Christ gave Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to 
God for an odour of sweet smell." 3 He here enjoins a 
love like Christ's by inviting consideration of His sacrifice. 
But the comparison was probably more literary than ritual 
in its origin ; he was thinking of the sacrifices God de- 
lighted in rather than of those the priest loved to offer. 4 
But one famous Pauline text owes its importance to what 
we may term a Levitical category : " Whom God set forth 
(as) propitiatory through faith in His blood." 5 There are 
here two sacrificial terms, (a) IXaar^piov = " propitiatory," and 
(/3) eV too avrov a'Cfjuart = " in His blood." As to (a) the 
term is difficult whether taken according to its classical or 
its Hellenistic usage, and it is not easy to determine its 
sense exegetically. For reasons impossible to enumerate it 
is here regarded as an adjective qualifying cV, " whom," i.e. 
Christ Jesus. He is set forth as a propitiatory person, one 
able to perform the things the verse goes on to describe. 
As to (/3) the phrase is characteristically Pauline, and occurs 
in contexts which emphasize its sacrificial quality. 6 The 

many views of sacrifice in the Old Testament. With the Levitical view, 
properly so called, no writer had less affinity than Paul, and no one 
was less influenced by it ; but it would be hard to overestimate the 
influence exercised on his mind by the suffering servant of God in the 
later Isaiah. For a severe and not quite fair criticism of Ritschl, see 
Seeberg, Der Tod Christi, pp. 201-203. 

1 1 Cor. v. 8. 2 Ante, p. 423. 3 Eph. v. 2. 

4 Cf. Ps. xl. 6 ; Heb. x. 5, 6. 5 Rom. iii. 25. 

6 Rom. v. 9 ; 1 Cor. x. 16 ; Col. i. 20 ; Eph. i. 7 ; ii. 13 



494 THE SACRIFICIAL PERSON BECOMES 

stress laid on it being "His" is manifestly intended to 
differentiate it from the blood of beasts, whether of the 
paschal lamb or the Levitical animals. If, then, these terms 
be so understood, what does the sentence taken as a whole 
affirm ? (i.) That the person of Christ as propitiatory is a 
means by which guilty man can be reconciled to the 
righteous God. (ii.) That it owes this character to the 
express and public act of God, who of His own will and from 
His own initiative, unmoved by anything which man had 
done, set forth for all eyes to see this propitiatory person, 
(iii.) To this public act of God there is needed a responsive 
and correlative act of man — " through faith." This, too, is 
characteristically Pauline ; for he is most mystical when most 
doctrinal. Where God wills and man believes the two 
coalesce in a unity which yet dissolves the personality of 
neither, (iv.) The aspect under which faith sees the pro- 
pitiatory person is sacrificial — " in His blood." (v.) While 
the person and the death had a history in time His pro- 
pitiatory quality is as timeless as the act of God, i.e. it 
explains why He passed over " the sins done aforetime," and 
"demonstrates His righteousness in the present," proving 
Him for all time to be "just while the justifier of him who 
is of faith in Jesus." We may say, then, that Paul in this 
text conceived Christ as having fulfilled for all time, by the 
gracious act of God, all the functions which the Levitical 
legislation proposed to perform for Israel. His person was 
an institution erected by the will of God, with whom the 
initiative remains, for the saving of man. In Christ, then, 
the elaborate mechanism of the priestly worship is done 
away ; faith sees the inner purpose and the outer ways of 
God as God Himself knows them, and the justified man 
lives in love and peace with the just God. 

2. But it is in the Epistle to the Hebrews that we find 
the Levitical categories most exhaustively used. Christ is 
there conceived as at once priest and sacrifice, in each case 



THE GREAT HIGH PRIEST 495 

in the later and liturgical rather than the older and domestic 
sense. The priest is defined as a mediator designated of 
man and called of God, " that he may offer both gifts and 
sacrifices for sins." 1 The two ideas stand, therefore, together : 
no priest without a sacrifice, and the sacrifice ever is as the 
priest is. Hence he is the determinative idea ; if he is 
changed, the law or religion is also changed. 2 But in the 
twofold aspect of his office correlative ethical qualities are 
involved : towards men he ought to exercise a measured 
sympathy (/j,6Tpco7radeiv Swd/juevos), and before God he must 
stand purged from sin. 3 Now in these respects Christ was 
qualified pre-eminently for the high priesthood. He was 
" without sin," and in eternity God said to Him : " Thou art 
My Son, this day have I begotten Thee." 4 While by origin, 
nature, and rank, He stood before men the image and re- 
presentative of God, 5 yet He so partook of flesh and blood, 
and was so made in all things like unto His brethren, as to 
be able to stand in their name before God. 6 And He was 
qualified in character as well as in nature, being so " touched 
with a feeling of our infirmities," as to be able to succour the 
tempted. 7 Hence both the vocation of God and the designa- 
tion of man were His. 8 

But how could Jesus, who was of Judah and not of Levi, 
the priestly race which alone, according to the law, could 
offer sacrifices in the Temple, be in any proper sense a high 
priest ? 9 Here the writer boldly transcends the Levitical 
categories, in order that he may prove the old covenant to 
be provisional and transient, while the new is final and per- 
manent. And he does this by an argument which has an 
instructive parallel in Paul. The latter says the promise is 
the older, the law is the younger, and it was introduced not 
as an end in itself, but as a means towards the end con- 



v. 1, 4. A vii. 12. 8 v. 2 ; vn. 27. 

iv. 15 ; v. 5. 5 i. 2, 3. 

7 iv. 15 ; ii. 8 ; vii. 26. 8 v. 5 ; vii. 28. 



4 iv. 15 ; v. 5. 5 i. 2, 3. 6 ii. 14, 17. 



496 THE ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK 

tained in the promise. 1 The promise therefore can never 
be superseded by the law, and comes to life again in the 
gospel. The writer of Hebrews uses personal names, but 
he intends the same thing. There was an older priesthood, 
one independent of the descent and succession which were 
of the essence of Aaron's, viz. Melchizedek's, " who abideth 
a priest continually." 2 His office did not owe its being to 
any father or mother, or its continuance to any child, for it 
was constituted by the vocation of God, and had neither 
beginning of days nor end of life. So the Levitical objec- 
tion to a priesthood unauthorized and contrary to the law 
is anticipated and answered thus : " I do not claim for 
Christ an Aaronic priesthood, — that were but to affirm that 
He was made ' after the law of a carnal commandment ' ; 
but I do claim that He belongs to an older, a higher, and 
a more unchangeable order, made ' after the power of an 
endless life.' 3 And He was so made by the act of God, 
who said unto Him : ' Thou art a priest for ever after 
the order of Melchizedek.' 4 The superiority of this order 
to yours is manifest ; for did not the lower priest do hom- 
age to the higher when Levi in Abraham paid tithes to 
Melchizedek ? 5 The old priests were instituted ' without 
oath ' ; but to Christ ' the Lord sware and will not repent 
Himself, Thou art a priest for ever.' 6 In the old order there 
was a multitude, ever issuing from birth, ever devoured by 
death ; in the new order there is but one, who ' abideth for 
ever.' 7 He, as sinless, has no need like the old high priests 
' to offer up sacrifices for His own sins ' ; nor is He like 
them a man 'having infirmity,' but He is 'the Son perfected 
for evermore.'" 8 

The comparison which has thus become a fundamental 
contrast is not simply personal and official but also ob- 






1 Gal. iii. 17-19. 


2 vi. 20 ; vii. 1-3. 


3 vii. 16. 


* v. 6 ; vii. 17. 


5 vii. 4-10. 


6 vii. 21. 


7 vii. 23, 24. 


8 v. 3 ; vii. 26-28. 





IDENTITY OF PRIEST AND SACRIFICE 497 

jective, relates to the system or religion as well as to the 
priesthood. The note of time is stamped upon the Levitical 
institution ; eternity and immutability are the attributes of 
Christ, who is "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." 1 
He has " become the surety of a better covenant," 3 while 
that which has been " groweth old and waxeth aged and 
nigh to vanishing away." 3 He " is able to save to the utter- 
most them that draw nigh unto God through Him"; 4 but 
though the old priest stood day by day ministering, he 
offered sacrifices "which could never take away sins." 5 And 
it is at this point, where the objective comparison becomes 
most acute as a contrast, that the argument as to the abolition 
of the old by the new covenant becomes most emphatic and 
conclusive. The law had a multitude of sacrifices, the new 
faith has but one ; yet its one is of infinitely more worth 
than all the multitude offered under the law. K They were 
bulls and goats and calves, and though repeated without 
ceasing they yet gave God no pleasure, nor did they cleanse 
the man's conscience, or qualify him to serve God. 7 But 
Christ's sacrifice, which He offered " once for all," was Him- 
self ; 8 the very reason of His coming in the flesh was that 
He might offer Himself to God, whose will He delighted 
to do, and who was weary of " whole burnt offerings and 
sacrifices for sin." 9 

3. The transmuting of the priest into the sacrifice with- 
out losing the identity and the reality of either — on the con- 
trary, only making both more sure and their unity yet more 
absolute — is a striking audacity of thought, and enables the 
writer to bring his argument to a remarkable synthesis 
which we may represent thus : 

i. The Son accomplishes what He does in harmony with 
the will of the Father, who appoints Him to the office, calls 

1 xiii. 8. * vii. 22. 8 viii. 13. 

4 vii. 25. 5 x. n. 6 ix. 11, 12, 25, 26. 

7 ix. 13 ; x. 4. 8 ix. 26. 9 x. 5-10. 

P.C.R. 3 2 



498 THE PRIESTHOOD AND SACRIFICE 

Him to the priesthood, approves the sacrifice which is 
prompted by the delight to do His will, and is offered 
through the eternal Spirit. 

ii. The unity of the priest and the sacrifice secures to the 
sacrifice all the worth, the dignity, the grace and the power 
which belong to the person ; and secures to the priest all the 
virtue, the merit, the redemptive efficacy which inhere in the 
sacrifice. Hence He is said to have made purification of sins, 1 
to have destroyed him that had the power of death and 
delivered those who lived in bondage to it. 2 He is the 
author of eternal salvation, brings in a better hope, remits 
sins, perfects the sanctified, and wins eternal redemption. 3 
The blood which He shed in sacrifice speaks better things 
than that of Abel, purges the conscience from dead works, 
and because of it God remembers our sins and iniquities no 
more. 4 

iii. His eternal priesthood signifies His eternal existence ; 
i.e. His power to save is without beginning and is everlasting. 
This has, so to say, a temporal and a spatial expression, 
(a) The temporal expression shows that though the sacrifice 
was made at a single point of time, yet it ranged backward 
as well as forward, " else He must have suffered often since 
the foundation of the world." 5 And this finds splendid 
illustration in chapter xi. Those who are there named are 
men who have believed "unto the saving of the soul." 6 
They did not live by the Levitical priests or their sacrifices, 
but " by faith " ; and faith signified that as Moses " esteemed 
the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures of 
Egypt," 7 the secret of their strength was with Him. In this 
historical and personal form we find the same permanence 
ascribed to Christ that Paul states in the more abstract 
terms of the mystery and hidden wisdom which God had 
before the worlds determined to reveal, or of the Providence 

1 i. 3. 2 ii. 14, 15. 3 v. 9 ; vii. 19 ; ix. 12. * xii. 24, 17 ; ix. 14. 
5 ix. 26. 6 x. 39. 7 xi. 26. 



ETERNAL EFFECTUAL UNIVERSAL 



499 



which has continued since the creation of this visible order. 
(/3) The spatial expression is quite as characteristic. The 
writer cannot think of the priest and the sacrifice without 
the Temple ; and he is Alexandrian enough to allegorize 
or spiritualize without personalizing the place. Christ has 
passed through the heavens, has indeed entered heaven 
itself, appeared before the face of God for us, and sat down 
at the right hand of the Majesty on high. 1 Hence the 
throne of God has become " the throne of grace," 2 which we 
can approach with boldness, and " enter into the holy place 
by the blood of Jesus." He, therefore, abides " eternal in 
the heavens," " the Mediator of the new covenant," a being 
as imperishable as His home. 3 

iv. The unchangeable is also a universal priesthood. He 
says indeed that Jesus suffered " that He might sanctify the 
people through His own blood " ; but " the people " here 
does not mean Israel, but " the spirits of just men made 
perfect"; 4 for, as the author says, Jesus " tasted death for 
every man " (vTrep 7ravTo?), 5 and became " the Author of 
eternal salvation unto all them that obey Him." The 
correlate of perpetuity is thus universality ; the sacrifice that 
knows no time can show no respect of persons. The man 
for whom He died is all mankind. 

v. Our discussion has been concerned not with the doc- 
trine, but with the religious function of the death ; yet it is 
necessary to say a word as to one theological question. Is 
the sacrifice here conceived as vicarious ? This has been met 
with a very decided negative ; and it has been argued that 
substitution was unknown to the Levitical sacrifices, which 
were gifts to God rather than expiatory sufferings ; that " the 
scapegoat " which bore the sins of Israel was a symbolical 
act, but no proper sacrifice, for it was not offered to God, but 
driven away into the desert. 6 This may or may not be true, 

1 viii. I. 2 iv. 16. 3 viii. 6. 4 xiii. 12 ; xii. 23, 24. 5 ii. 9. 

6 Menegoz, La Theologie de LEpitre aux Hebreux, pp. 11 8- 120. 



500 THE PROPHETIC IDEA OF SACRIFICE 

but it does not determine the question. For Christ's sacrifice, 
like His priesthood, stands in an order by itself. Christ 
offered Himself to God. Why ? For our sins. Wherein was 
He distinguished from the Levitical high priests ? He was 
sinless, they were sinful, and so while they needed to offer 
for themselves, He did not. How, then, shall we conceive a 
sacrificial act, which was purely for others, and in no respect 
for the offerer Himself? We may be too fastidious to use 
the terms " vicarious " and " substitutionary," but it is easier 
to object to the terms than to escape the idea they express. 

vi. This exposition, then, leaves us with the principle 
already formulated : a person is substituted for an institution ; 
one uncreated and immortal Priest supersedes all mortal and 
visible priesthoods. The full significance of this has yet to 
be seen, but one point may here be emphasized — the change 
in the priesthood signified a radical change in the relation 
of God to sacrifice. In the Levitical, as in other religious 
systems, the sacrifice was offered to please God, to win His 
favour, to propitiate Him by the surrender of some object 
precious to man. But in the Christian system this stand- 
point is transcended : the initiative lies with God, for in the 
fine phrase of the writer, " it became Him, in bringing many 
sons unto glory, to make the Author of their salvation perfect 
through sufferings." 1 Whatever the death of Christ may 
signify, it does not mean an expedient for quenching the 
wrath of God, or for buying off man from His vengeance. 
This was a gain for religion greater than mind can calculate. 

§ IV. The Christian Sacrifice Interpreted through 
the Prophetic Idea 

With Hebrews the attempt to draw a formal parallel be- 
tween Christ and the Levitical system may be said to end ; 
and so, with the exception of a possible and figurative refer- 

1 ii. 10. 



THE NEW SERVANT OF GOD 501 

ence in the Apocalypse, ' He is never again described as 
" the high priest of our confession." 2 But this does not mean 
that the idea of His person as the new and purer institution 
was dropped cr forgotten ; on the contrary, the tendency was 
to increase the emphasis on its reconciliatory function. He be- 
came more and more the sole ground and means of worship ; 
but He was construed more through prophetic ideas than 
through Levitical customs. This is most apparent in 1 Peter, 
which we may describe as an exposition of Christ in the 
terms of the Second Isaiah. So it is said that He "did no sin, 
neither was guile found in His mouth " ; that He " bare our 
sins in His own body upon the tree," and suffered " the 
righteous for the unrighteous" ; 3 and that the Spirit of Christ 
" in the prophets testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ 
and the glories that should follow them." 4 More distinctly 
prophetical still is the picture of Him as " a Lamb without 
blemish and without spot," 5 " foreknown before the founda- 
tion of the world." The latter phrase suggests the lamb in 
the Apocalypse, which, in the picturesque speech of the Seer, 
is said to have been " slain from the foundation of the world." 6 
Both books thus represent the timelessness which belongs to 
the sacrifice, which, though to us it occurs at a given moment, 
yet stands to God's eye above and outside time, as real before 
as after man saw it happen. The lamb is, indeed, the most 
tender and the most terrible figure in the Apocalypse, at once 
august and winsome to those who love and worship, awful and 
intolerable to those who despise. Twenty-nine times does 
the Seer refer to Him ; in His blood the guilty are cleansed 
and made saints, who praise His name for ever and ever ; 7 be- 
fore His throne the wicked stand, and call upon the moun- 
tains to fall and hide them from His wrath. 8 The same figure, 
interpreted through the same prophetic category, appears in 

1 i. 13. 2 HeU iii. 1. 3 ii. 22-24 ; '>>• 18 ; cf. Isa. liii. 4-9. 

* i. 11. 5 i. 19-20; cf. Isa. liii. 7. 6 xiii. 8. 

7 vii. 14 ; v. 9. 8 vi. 16 ; cf. xx. 11. 



502 THE NEW TABERNACLE OF GOD 

John's Gospel, 1 and is expounded and explained in his first 
Epistle. He is " the propitiation for our sins," and " His blood 
cleanses from all sin." 2 And alongside the idea of His com- 
plete efficacy as a sacrifice or institution which qualifies man 
for the worship of God, there stands an attitude of indifference 
to the Levitical system. It has become a question about which 
Jews may dispute, but in which the Christian has no concern, 3 
for he is purified by other agencies and in a more perfect de- 
gree; 4 and as if to show how all that the old symbols had 
struggled to express had now become intelligible and access- 
ible realities, Christ appears as " the tabernacle of God with 
men," as " the temple of God " in the New Jerusalem. 5 He is 
the image of the Invisible, and in Him " all the fulness of the 
Godhead " dwelleth. 6 The Divine presence which Israel once 
found in tabernacle and temple, man is now to find in Christ ; 
He lives in the heart of history as God manifest in flesh, 
that all men may see His glory and share His grace. 7 And 
the gate of this Temple stands open day and night, the pil- 
grim does not find it closed against him, nor need any child 
of the city mourn that he cannot scale its walls, for no stone 
was used to build it ; and no buyers or sellers can traffic in 
its courts, or moneychangers sit at their tables in the sacred 
precincts, for its privileges are without price, and they that 
come to worship must come as the consciously poor who 
but seek to be clothed and fed. And within no proud or 
greedy priest can bid the broken in spirit depart unpitied, or 
claim from the destitute what his poverty cannot give ; for 
the only high priest of God's making is there, and His grace 
is free and is too precious to be sold of heaven or bought of 
man. And still translating a symbolical idea into an eternal 
truth, the unity of man in the worship of God replaces the old 
unity of the elect people. Where men worship in Him the 

1 i. 29 ; cf. ante, p. 457. 2 iii. 5 ; ii. 2 ; iv. ic. 

8 Gospel of John, ii. 6 ; iii. 25. 4 1 John iii. 3. 

5 Rev. xxi. 3, 22. 6 Col. i. 15 ; ii. 9. 7 John i. 14. 



AND THE NEW LAW FOR MAN 503 

partitions which the ancient laws and ordinances of religion 
built up to divide race from race fall down, and show man 
standing face to face with man, one family before the one 
God. 

§ V. The Christian Idea Interpreted through the 
Rabbinical Law 

I. The atmosphere and the ideals of Rabbinical were very 
unlike those of Levitical Judaism, and were even more charac- 
teristic of the people and the religion. While the Levitical 
system perished with the Jewish state, the Rabbinical law 
survived it, as indeed it had the better historical right to do. 
For the decalogue represents the most fundamental and 
creative ideas in Israel ; and the most pious men did not 
cease to believe that a regulated life was more agreeable to 
God than an elaborated worship. They conceived Him to 
be righteous rather than holy in the Levitical sense, a moral 
Sovereign who governed men and States and approved 
only those who obeyed His will. Their law was instruction 
rather than institution, and their sphere more the school 
than the temple. But though their ideas and ends were 
ethical, their means were legal, and they imagined that 
they could make man moral by defining and enlarging the' 
rules by which he ought to live. And as these rules were 
based on two notions, that Israel was God's people, and that 
God was Israel's God, so their function was to keep the 
people for God and God for the people. Their ideal became > 
therefore, on the religious side, an intense particularism ; and 
on the moral an obedience according to statutory regulations,- 
though the statutes were those of the school rather than of 
the State. Now a morality which lives by rule ceases to be 
moral ; its root may be piety, but its fruit is formalism ; the 
more complex life grows the more numerous and vexatious 
become its regulations, more emphatic as to the details and 



504 MAN REDEEMED FROM THE LAW 

oblivious as to the major motives and principles of life. And 
this describes the Rabbinical school and the Pharisaic sect 
of Christ's time ; they showed how a moral religion, juristi- 
cally construed and enforced, ceases to be either religious or 
moral. So certainly it seemed, after due experiment made, 
to Saul of Tarsus. He had the feeling for conduct which had 
distinguished the most pious of his people and the most 
eminent of their prophets; but he found the law, which, as God's, 
was intended to make man Godlike, unequal to its work. 
Though he so lived that " as touching the righteousness which 
is in the law," 1 he was" found blameless" ; yet this righteous- 
ness, which was too unreal to satisfy himself, he could not 
conceive as approved of God. So driven by his imperious 
conscience for conduct, he turned to Christ, and there he found 
what he wanted — deliverance from the law, a righteousness 
which the law had prescribed but could not give, and a spring 
of action which made him a new man before God. In other 
words, the Person who had been made the sole religious insti- 
tution he translated into a sovereign and sufficient divine 
law. 

2. The principles which determined his thought have been 
formulated by himself in certain axiomatic phrases and sen- 
tences. 

i. " Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having 
become a curse for us." 3 There is here a personal experi- 
ence and a universal principle. The law had been to him a 
burden too heavy to be borne, but the death of Christ upon 
the cross had taken it away. Jesus was sinless, yet the Jews 
had said : " We have a law, and by that law He ought to 
die " ; and the cross to which they condemned Him made 
Him in its eye unclean, " for it is written, Cursed is every 
one that hangeth on a tree." But the law which condemned 
the holy was itself condemned ; for a ceremonial offence, 
which was in the last analysis its own infinite wrong against 
1 Phil. iii. 6. 2 Gal. iii. 13. 



THAT HE MAY LIVE UNTO GOD 505 

a righteous person, was judged as if it were His guilt. And 
did not the law that so judged Him prove by its very judge- 
ment that it had forgotten its moral character and function, 
and so could no longer bind the conscience or claim to 
govern the conduct ? And so Christ, by submitting to the 
cross and the curse it involved, redeemed Paul from the law 
and made him for ever the enemy of juristic and statutory 
religion. This personal experience defined, under its nega- 
tive form, the positive function of His death ; for it meant that 
the law was superseded, not in the interests of lawlessness, but 
of a more absolute obligation and higher ethical ideals. As to 
the principle it is too purely theological to be here discussed, 
but it may be stated that so far as law, taken in its most uni- 
versal sense, is forensic and positive, Christ, by having once 
become a curse for us, redeems us from its curse. 

ii. " Him who knew no sin, He (God) made to be sin on 
our behalf, in order that we might become the righteousness 
of God in Him." * The Pauline principles that meet in this 
verse, and are necessary for its interpretation, are fundamen- 
tal and far-reaching ; but its significance for Christianity as a 
religion lies on the surface. All worship, even where it most 
seeks to honour God, is designed to reconcile Him to man, or 
to make man more acceptable to Him. What makes recon- 
ciliation necessary is man's sin and self-will ; what is needed to 
his acceptability is a righteousness God approves. Out of 
the desire for reconciliation all the sacrifices by which man 
has striven to win the Divine favour, have come ; and out of 
his search after an acceptable righteousness all the rules and 
orders and penances by which he has laboured to make him- 
self agreeable to Deity, have issued. Now Paul here says, in 
effect : " In the work of reconciliation, God has taken the 
initiative, though in a fashion which becomes a Being too holy 
to tolerate sin. He has dealt with the sinless as if He had 
been sinful, allowing Him to bear ' the contradiction of 

1 2 Cor. v. 21. 



506 THE REDEEMER IS THE LAWGIVER 

sinners,' to feel forsaken of God, and even to taste death ; and 
He has done this in order that we who are the sinful might 
become possessed of the righteousness which God gives to all 
who are in Christ." The act is absolute, but the result is con- 
ditional. God makes Christ to be sin, and in this action, 
though it is done on his behalf, man has no part ; but he be- 
comes the righteousness of God only provided he is so incor- 
porated with Christ, and Christ with him, that they stand 
before God as one being. It is the function of faith to estab- 
lish this unity, which is spiritual ; while the unity by virtue 
of which He could be made sin belongs to the nature which 
embodies the will of God. 

iii. The Christ who by His Cross " redeemed us from the 
curse of the law," and who was " made sin " in order that 
"we might become the righteousness of God in Him," 
creates also in us a new life which He supplies with motives 
and guides towards a divine end. This function Paul 
presents under three different aspects in three most char- 
acteristic texts. 

(a) " What the law could not do in that it was weak 
through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness 
of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that 
the righteous demand of the law (to Sttcaiw/jui rov vo/u,ov) 
might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh but 
after the Spirit." * Paul is no libertine, no lover of licence ; 
he renounced the law because it had failed to make man 
righteous, and he embraced Christ because through Him the 
requirements of the law can be fulfilled. God is throughout 
the active subject ; He sends His Son, He determines the 
likeness the Son is to bear and the reason for it ; He " con- 
demns sin in the flesh " ; and His is the end to be realized, 
which is one with the purpose of the law and due to the 
law's failure to fulfil its purpose. 

(/3) " The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus 
1 Rom. viii. 3, 4. 



THE PERSONALIZED IDEAL A LAW 507 

judge that one died for all, therefore all died ; and He 
died for all, in order that they who live should no longer 
live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them and 
rose again." x The love of Christ is said to " constrain," i.e. 
so to shut up and confine the stream of life as to determine 
it and all its energies towards a given end, because of a 
twofold judgement — (i.) the identity of Christ's death with 
our death, His as unmerited being undertaken on our behalf, 
and ours as merited being realized in His ; and (ii.) the 
purpose of His death, not that we may be relieved from 
penalty, but that we may live unto Him, i.e. He as end 
was to be the new law governing life. The doctrine of the 
text is here neither explained nor defended nor criticized, 
though it is obvious that no criticism based on the atomism 
or rigorous individualism of the race could here be relevant. 
Paul does not write as one who thought that the race had 
no responsibility for the individual, or the individual no 
existence in the race ; but as one who conceives man as 
a unity, and this unity as impersonated and realized in 
Christ. He is the personalized ideal of humanity ; what He 
does or suffers man does and endures. To live unto Him 
is, therefore, to Paul to live for the service of man, to work 
and suffer and, if need be, die as He did for the saving 
of humanity, actual and ideal. 

(7) " I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer 
I that live but Christ liveth in me." 2 This illustrates the 
first text, and states in the form of a personal experi- 
ence the idea expressed in the second. The old man, the 
man who lived under the law and realized through the 
flesh all its weakness, who hated, persecuted and killed in 
its name, is dead, " crucified with Christ." And this dead 
man knows no resurrection, his death is eternal ; and the 
new life which dwells in the old form is not his own but 
Christ's, " who loved me and gave Himself for me." 
1 2 Cor. v. 14, 15. 2 Gal. ii. 20. 



508 THE NEW LAW IS LOVE 

§ VI. Love of Christ the new Law 

I. Paul thus, by means of his larger philosophy, assigns 
to Christ a much greater place in religion than the writer 
who construed Him through the Levitical categories. He 
is not only an institution for worship, but a law for the 
government of man ; He creates at once the right relation 
to God and the true spirit of worship, evokes the humanity 
latent in man and realizes the proper order of society. 
The ideal He is He inspires man to become. There is 
nothing so remarkable in the whole history of human 
thought as this interpretation of a person not only into a 
universal religious institution but also into an absolute law at 
once moral and religious ; and there is something miraculous 
in the way in which the interpretation has been realized, the 
simplicity of the means forming such a contrast to the im- 
mensity of the achievement. Enthusiasms seldom outlive 
the generation that sees them born, and a dead enthusiasm, 
save as the affectation of a sect or a set, returns to life no 
more. But to one enthusiasm which appeals to no earthly 
or sordid passion, man has for sixty generations been faith- 
ful ; it is the enthusiasm which Paul terms " the love of 
Christ." Love is as old as man, and so Christ did not 
make it, but by consenting to become its object He gave 
it a new character and new qualities, a new function and 
new ends. Love indeed is more native to man than the air 
he breathes, for he breathes the air in common with the 
animals, but the love he knows is the distinctive note of 
his humanity. It waits his coming into the world, it weeps 
his leaving it ; it ministers every moment to his most 
common and crying needs. Through the gates of its 
glorious romance we all enter into the larger day ; at 
its touch the youth blossoms into the man ; the maiden 
blushes into the woman ; the sorrows of the mother are 
transmuted into a ministry of joy ; the labour of the father 



WHICH CHRIST HAS TRANSFIGURED 509 

ceases to be a burden and his very toil grows sweet. Before 
Christ, as since, poets sang of its pleasures and its pains, 
its divine madness, its delirious delights, its infinite longing, 
its lasting bitterness or its abiding peace. In its honour 
or to its shame tragedies have been written telling of the 
lives it has made or marred, the struggles with destiny it 
has provoked, the deaths it has braced men to die, the 
lives it has persuaded men to live. And it was this love, 
so common and large, so pitiful and tragic, so commanding 
the destiny which brings ruin or glory to the man, that 
Christ took and lifted into a transcendent ethical power. 
The love which the poet had praised was sensuous in its 
form and personal in its character and aims ; it was a 
passion for possession ; it might desire to merge one's being 
in another's, or rather another's being in one's own, but 
it was in all its forms a passion to possess. But out of 
this love Christ made the most self-forgetful of forces, a 
law that moved man towards righteousness and all be- 
nevolence. We call it by many names, but no name is 
equal to all its activities and attributes. It is an enthusiasm 
for humanity, for the redemption of the fallen, for the 
Tightening of the wronged, for building up the ruined, for 
beautifying the wasted ; but however named, it remains 
a passion to serve man for love of Christ. And He in- 
vested this love with the qualities that made it not an 
occasional and fitful but a constant energy, an invariable 
moral dynamic. It did not die on the Cross, but became 
immortal with Him, a permanent factor of amelioration 
which had its continued being guaranteed by His. Hence 
it is a love which, like the priesthood of Melchizedek, stands 
in an order by itself. The love which is as old as man 
is embalmed in his literatures, but we embalm only the 
dead. At the dawn of Greek letters we see Penelope 
sitting in her hall in rocky Ithaca surrounded by the hungry 
and urgent wooers, while the husband of her youth tarries, 



5io THE DEAD LOVES OF LITERATURE 

wandering through many lands and learning from many 
men. The wooers she cannot love, and none of them will she 
wed, for her heart is with the far-travelled Odysseus who 
comes not, though well she knows that he is sure to return. 
To calm the strife of the suitors she promises to wed when 
the web she weaves so openly by day is woven ; but by 
night she unweaves what she had woven by day that the end 
may not be till the day breaks which shall bring the wanderer 
home. But though the love of Penelope for Odysseus touches 
the imagination of the living, yet it is but a dead love. 
We love the poetry that speaks of it, the stately measures 
that linger in the ear like the music of a celestial voice ; 
but what is loved is literature, not a passion that so holds 
the heart as to command the conscience and regulate the 
life. And Homer stands here for all Greek, nay, for all 
ancient literature ; it is but a splendid tomb which Genius 
has built as a monument to love, that the memory of it may 
survive death and that it may become the admiration and 
joy of later men. And as with ancient so with modern 
literature ; it begins to be when the stern and solitary soul 
of Dante breaks into responsive music at the touch of the 
most gentle lady Beatrice. We descend with him the circles 
of his " Inferno " ; we struggle up the steep and arduous 
mount of the " Purgatorio " ; we look through his eyes and 
behold afar off the great throne of light, the home of the 
blessed, to which his eyes and ours are drawn ; and what 
compels him to go and us to follow is the hope that he 
may catch a glimpse of the most gentle lady in the paradise 
where she dwells in eternal peace. But while we suffer 
with Dante the pangs of a love that though it cannot be 
told yet will not be denied the comfort of speech, still the 
story he tells and we hear is of a love so dead that no will 
can revive it. The literature which is its shrine appeals to the 
imagination that seeks culture, but the love within the shrine 
is but dust and ashes which no voice can ever charm back 



THE LIVING LOVE IN RELIGION 511 

into life. But the love of Christ is not a dead love, en- 
tombed in a classical literature, it lives and quickens and 
creates as no human thing can do. Age does not wither 
its ineffable charm, nor does the lapse of time exhaust its 
exuberant energies. It has created many literatures in many 
tongues ; lyrics that express a passion that only loss of self 
in the eternal love can satisfy ; epics that express the apostasy 
and departure of the soul from God, its wandering through 
many deserts of sin, where its thirst is deep and its pains 
severe, until it returns humbled and penitent to the Father's 
feet ; tragedies that describe the struggles of the will that 
would fain have followed the lust of the eye and the pride 
of life, but could not for the grace that hedged it round 
and drew it back to the home it had forsaken but could 
not forget. Twenty centuries have passed since " they took 
Jesus and laid Him in a new tomb," but love of Him they 
did not bury, for it never died ; and every day between 
this and then it has proved itself alive by the conquests it 
has made, compelling men to renounce loved vices and 
sending gentle women into the loathly slum, the deadly 
camp, or wherever man needed the hand of gracious help- 
fulness. This is the one love which abides while the lovers 
die, for it is possessed of immortal youth and the inex- 
haustible energies which are born of God. 

2. But the love which is thus immortal has also the quality 
of sufficiency for its work. There is an ethical counterpart to 
the correlation of the physical forces. The vision which rises 
before the imagination of the physicist, when he sees his 
atoms falling through a space which he thinks of as otherwise 
vacant, and which knows no light of sun or star, is impres- 
sive. He sees them marshalled in their innumerable hosts, 
not as an unordered heap, but as a disciplined army, with its 
laws given in the form and weight of every separate unit. 
In obedience to these laws he sees them pass through infinite 
evolutions and involutions, now massing, now dissolving their 



512 CORRELATION OF ETHICAL FORCES 

columns, yet ever marching breast forward across limitless 
fields of space and through unmeasured periods of time to the 
creation of the heavens and the earth. And if the eye of the 
seer of science be not weary, he may note how the cycle of 
change continues, and how the same force, unhasting, un- 
resting, one, manifold, in form transient, in essence perma- 
nent, working through incalculable ages, appears now on the 
cooling mass as rock and vapour, as land and water, as 
plant and animal, or now as all that makes the endless 
panorama of earth and sea and sky, and now as the 
succession of organs and organisms that constitute our living 
world. * But more marvellous than this correlation and 
ceaseless conversion of physical forces are the correlation 
and the persistent permutations of the ethical energy which 
we call the love of Christ. It began to be in Him and with 
Him, and without increase or decrease it took shape in the 
men He made apostles ; then, without any loss of momentum 
or intensity, changed its form and appeared as sub-apostolic 
men, apologists, fathers, and churches which rose round the 
shores of the tideless Mediterranean ; then as missionaries who 
wandered through many lands, creating new peoples in the 
Syrian desert, in central Europe, on the bleak shores of the 
northern seas, and in furthest Asia. And dispersion did not 
dissipate it, for the lapse of time has not exhausted its energy ; 
on the contrary, expenditure has only seemed to increase its 
potency and the capacity for conversion into forms still more 
infinitely varied. New peoples it has made have replaced 
the old, have colonized unknown continents, and made them 
as fertile as their own, building up societies and States, which 
illustrate anew the power of this marvellous love. And 
so it seems as if this gracious ethical energy is a force as 
incapable of perishing as it is capable of accomplishing the 
work it has been charged to perform. 

1 Ante, p. 354. A similar figure is employed, though for a different 
purpose. 



LOVE NECESSARY TO SERVICE 513 

3. And without this love man is unfitted for the service of 
his kind. For man to be served must be loved, but the 
supreme difficulty is to love the men who most need our 
service. Hate is easy, and where we hate it is both agreeable 
and natural to wish to injure. Where we do not love we feel 
no need to pity or to spare. Milton's Satan knew sin, knew 
how terrible it was to himself, making of him a hell, from 
which he saw no way of escape. But though he knew sin 
as the most terrible of all possible miseries, yet he had so 
little pity for man, and he so wished to spite God, that he 
crossed chaos, passed sin and death, and assumed forms dis- 
agreeable to his proud spirit, that he might tempt man to 
become even as he was — a hell with hells beneath so low 
and deep, as to make the hell then suffered seem a heaven. 
Hate of God made Satan pitiless to man, and his ruin a 
thing from which it was foolish to shrink. And all seduction 
is devilish because it is pitiless ; it never springs from affection, 
ever from the lust that is self-indulgence. It has no imagina- 
tion to see the misery it causes, has only the brutal passion 
which must be gratified that the baser self may be pleased 
On the other hand the love of Christ creates not simply the 
pity that dare not harm, but also the grace that must save 
It is here indeed that we discover the most characteristic 
quality in the love of Christ. To love Him is to love man. 
This is a function as unique as it is high, for he who despises 
cannot bless, nor can he who is despised be blessed. Hate 
is not a thing that need be spoken ; it is understood without 
words, discerned without acts. It has only to be felt in 
order to be known, and to disqualify the man who feels it 
from serving the man who knows that it is there. And so love 
is necessary to the service of man. But then there are multi- 
tudes of men it is impossible to love. An abstract sin need 
provoke no passion, but concrete sin, which means the actual 
sinner, cannot fail to breed dislike. Hypocrisy is what every 
honest soul hates, but love of the hypocrite is less possible 

P.C.R. 33 



514 LOVE OVERCOMING EVIL 

still. A lie no man can love, and a liar is worse and less 
lovable than his lie. But Christ makes possible what these 
necessitated antipathies most sternly forbid. For to love 
Him is to love all mankind. He is not a single person ; He 
is to those who know Him collective man, who is loved in 
the love of Him. Yet the man who is loved in Him is loved, 
in spite of his actual and radical evil, as a man capable of 
conversion, with this capability made everywhere and always 
possible of realization. And it is this love, not of the sin, 
but of the hidden and possible saint in the sinner, that makes 
the love of Christ so essentially ameliorative, a passion to 
seek as well as to save. And what does the immortal 
necessity and sufficiency of His love prove save that the 
experience of man has come to confirm the truth discovered 
by the experience of Paul, that the love of Christ was 
the law of God compelling men to obey Him and serve 
mankind ? 

Ed io udi' : " Per intelletto umano, 
E per autoritadi a lui Concorde, 
De' tuoi amori a Dio guarda il soprano. 

Ma di' ancor, se tu senti altre corde 
Tirarti verso lui, si che tu suone 
Con quanti denti questo amor ti morde." 

Non fu latente la santa intenzione 

Dell' aquila di Cristo, anzi m' accorsi 
Dove volea menar mia professione. 

Pero ricominciai : " Tutti quei morsi ; 
Che posson far lo cor volger a Dio, 
Alia mia caritate son concorsi ; 

Che l'essere del mondo, el'esser mio, 
La morte ch' ei sostenne perch' io viva, 
E quel che spera ogni fedel, com' io, 

Con la predetta conoscenza viva, 
Tratto m' hanno del mar dell' amor torto, 
E del diritto m' han posto alia riva 

Le fronde onde s'infronda tutto l'orto 
Dell' ortolano eterno, am' io cotanto, 
Quanto da lui a lor di bene e porto." 

— Dante. 



We read in our Books of a nice Athenian, being entertained in a place 
by one given to Hospitality, finding anon that another was received with 
the like courtesie, and then a third, growing very angry, " I thought," 
said he, " that I had found here gev£>va, but I have found navdox^ov ; 
I looked for a Friend's house, but I am fallen into an Inne to entertain 
all Comers, rather than a lodging for some private and especial Friends." 
Let it not offend any that I have made Christianity rather an Inne to 
receive all, than a private house to receive some few. — John Hales. 

Why measure we God by our selves, but because we are led with gay 
shews, and goodly things, and think it is so with God ? Seneca reports, that 
a Pantomitnus, a Poppet-player and Dancer in Rome, because he pleased 
the People well, was wont to go up every day into the Capitol, and prac- 
tise his Art, and dance before Jupiter, and thought he did the god a 
great pleasure. Beloved, in many things we are like unto this Poppet- 
player, and do much measure God by the People, by the World. 

—John Hales. 

The Divinity alwaies enjoies itself and its own Infinite perfections, 
seeing it is that Eternall and stable Sun of goodness that neither rises 
nor sets, is neither eclipsed nor can receive any encrease of light and 
beauty. Hence the Divine Love is never attended with those turbulent 
passions, perturbations, or wrestlings within it self of Fear, Desire, Grief, 
A?iger, or any such like, whereby our Love is wont to explicate and 
unfold its affection towards its Object. But as the Divine Love is per- 
petually most infinitely ardent and potent, so it is alwaies calm and 
serene, unchangeable, having no such ebbings and flowings, no such 
diversity of stations and retrogradations as that Love hath in us which 
ariseth from the weakness of our Understandings, that doe not present 
things to us alwaies in the same Orient lustre and beauty : neither we 
nor any other mundane thing (all which are in a perpetual flux) are 
alwaies the same. — John Smith, the Platonist. 

Dem gegeniiber eroffnet sich uns durch den jetzt gewonnenen Begriff 
des Anfangs auch der Einblick in die Moglichkeit eines Fortgangs des 
Processes der Menschwerdung, eines solchen Fortgangs, welcher sich, 
wie die Idee der Sohnmenschheit es fordert, nicht in einem einzelnen 
Zeitpuncte der Menschengeschichte, sondern in alien Zeiten, nicht an 
einer einzelnen Person, sondern an dem gesammten menschlichen 
Geschlecht vollzieht.— WEISSE. 



5'5 



o fiev 8rj 9eoy, tbsTrep Kai 6 nakaios Xoyos, apX*l v Te Kai TeXevrf/v Kai picra 
tS>v ovt(ov aTrdvTcnv ex <ov ' ev ^ eia irepaivei Kara (pv<riv irepnropevopevos. 

— Plato. 

'Ek Alos dpxa>pe(r8a, tov oiBeTror' av8pes ilbpev 
appTjrov, peo'Tal Se Atos Tracrai pev ayviai, 
Traaai S' avdpamuv ayopal, peo-TTj 8e OaXatra'a, 
Kai XijueVe?, Travrrj 8e Ato? K.€xpr)p^8a TTavTes' 
tov yap Kai yivos io-piv. — ARATUS. 

Such a sort of deity as should shut up itself, and be reclused from all 
converse with men, would leave us as disfurnished of an object of reli- 
gion, and would render a temple on earth as vain a thing, as if there 
were none at all. It were a being not to be worshipped, nor with any 
propriety to be called God, more (in some respect less) than an image or 
statue. We might with as rational design worship for God what were 
scarce worthy to be called the shadow of a man, as dedicate temples to 
a wholly unconversable deity. That is such a one as not only will not 
vouchsafe to converse with men, but that cannot admit it ; or whose 
nature were altogether incapable of such converse. — John Howe. 

For whatsoever the wisest men in the world, in all nations and religions, 
did agree upon, as most excellent in itself, and of greatest power to make 
political or future and immaterial felicities, all that, and much more, the 
holy Jesus adopted into his law : for they receiving sparks or single 
irradiations from the regions of light, or else having fair tapers shining 
indeed excellently in representations and expresses of morality, were all 
involved and swallowed up into the body of light, the sun of righteous- 
ness. Christ's discipline was the breviary of all the wisdom of the best 
men, and a fair copy and transcript of his Father's wisdom. 

—Jeremy Taylor. 

Christianity has materially contributed to call forth the idea of the unity 
of the human race and has thus tended to exercise a favourable influence 
on the humanization of nations in their morals, manners, and institutions. 
Although closely interwoven with the earliest doctrines of Christianity, 
this idea of humanity met with only a slow and tardy recognition, for at 
the time when the new faith was raised at Byzantium, from political 
motives, to be the established religion of the State, its adherents were 
already deeply involved in miserable party dissensions, whilst intercourse 
with distant nations was impeded, and the foundations of the empire 
were shaken in many directions by external assaults. Even the personal 
freedom of entire races of men long found no protection in Christian 
states from ecclesiastical landowners and corporate bodies. 

— Alexander von Humboldt. 



516 



PART III 

THE RELIGION OF CHRIST AND THE IDEAL OF 
RELIGION 

INTRODUCTORY 

WE have reached the point where our two main lines 
of analysis and argument coalesce. The First Book, 
which was concerned with the mind and purpose of God as 
expressed in Nature and in the history of Man, culminated 
in a discussion as to religions, local and universal, and as to 
the relation between those founded and their founders. The 
Second Book has been so far occupied with the persons and 
processes concerned in the founding of the Christian religion ; 
but its argument is still incomplete. We have yet to see 
how their ideal became actual, to ascertain whether it has 
qualities or attributes by virtue of which it may claim to 
be the only really universal religion. But before this can be 
attempted we must refer to certain introductory questions. 

i. Terms like " founder " and " founded " need to be em- 
ployed with caution. Strictly speaking, religions are not 
made, they grow ; for growth is the process which life follows 
when it builds up an organism for its own inhabitation and 
enlargement. Opposed to growth is the process we may call 
contrivance or manufacture, which is represented in religion 
by Syncretism, or the attempt by the conscious selection and 
adjustment of old materials to create a new cult or system. 
Now this process has been known in both ancient and 
modern times, the age in which Christianity was born 



518 CHRISTIANITY NOT A SYNCRETISM 

being particularly familiar with it. There were Romans who 
affected to think of the East as religious and wise, of Egypt 
as venerable and mysterious ; and it became a Roman fashion 
to seek from the strange deities and rites of the orient re- 
plenishment for the exhausted native sources of inspiration. 
But Syncretism in religion, like eclecticism in philosophy, is 
a sign of decadence, for it creates nothing that outlives the 
age or the coterie that gave it birth. It signifies that mind, 
fallen into conscious impotence and hopelessness, has turned 
its back upon the future and its face to the past ; and, 
despairing of producing or achieving anything, has begun to 
call upon vanished men and systems for principles which 
may help it to live. The mood is, as a rule, self-conscious 
and cynical as well as despondent, and so the formulae it 
borrows it builds, usually, to the music of a little disdainful 
and finical criticism, into a house of consolation and amuse- 
ment rather than a temple of truth and worship. 

ii. The last religion we could describe as a Syncretism 
is the Christian, and that for many reasons, though it will 
be enough to mention here two : (a) its founders were too 
completely ignorant of other theologies and philosophies to 
be affected by them ; and (/3) it was not an articulated skele- 
ton but a living organism, carrying within itself the principle 
of life. This does not mean that it was without relation to 
the past, for without the persons, ideas, customs and influences 
it inherited, it never could have been ; nor that it was iso- 
lated from the present, for if it had been untouched by living 
forces, it could not have reached living men. But it means 
that it behaved as a living being behaves, who, while the issue 
of a long ancestry, yet grows by transmuting into his own 
substance the matter his environment supplies. In other 
words, the religion grew because it lived, and it lived because 
it carried within it an immanent and architectonic idea, which 
governed it and yet was essentially its own. That idea was 
the belief it held concerning Jesus Christ, which double name 



BUT A LIVING ORGANISM 519 

denoted at once the historical person who was the first 
Christian and the transcendental ideal which had trans- 
formed God and religion, man and history. 

iii. The action of this idea upon the religion may best be 
discussed under three heads : (a) the people, or the medium 
in which the religion had to live ; (/3) the beliefs that made it, 
especially the belief which determines all others, the concep- 
tion of the Deity it worships ; and (7) the worship it offers 
Him, or the methods it follows to please Him and do 
Him honour, to cultivate the obedience and the virtues He 
approves. 



CHAPTER I 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST AND THE PEOPLE OF THE 
RELIGION 

§ I. The Problems to be Solved 

I. r I "*HE problems here are most complex, (a) The re- 
-I- ligion could not become an historical fact, still less 
a social force in the bosom of humanity, without a people, and 
a people was exactly what did not exist and what had, 
therefore, to be created. But creation is not a process which 
art can accomplish, and in this case there was nothing in the 
past experience of man to show how it could be done. (/3) If 
the religion was to be universal, the people must not be local 
or capable of being localized ; for if it were, the very degree 
in which it was identified with one family or tribe would make 
it alien to other races. (7) If a people is to have a single re- 
ligion, they must have the homogeneous consciousness which 
not only allows, but demands for its expression, identity of 
beliefs and worship ; but this had not as yet been realized, 
save under the magic influences of a common home and 
place. (S) A religion that would belong to all men must be 
without family customs, tribal institutions, or a national 
polity ; for unless it could live without these things, it had 
not learned to transcend the limitations of kinship and caste, 
language and colour. 

But while the immanent potentialities that create religion 
are universal, the forms it assumes, whether in belief or in 
worship, are determined by the empirical causes, — physical, 



RELIGION AS A LOCAL INSTITUTION 521 

ethical, intellectual, political, and economical, — which govern 
the social evolution as a whole. Thus the history of a re- 
ligion is but a special branch of its people's history, not to 
be construed unless they are conceived as a sort of colossal 
personality, continuous in being, though multitudinous in 
experience. The forces that evoke the energy to live develop 
the will to believe ; and where the forces are uniform the 
beliefs constitute a unity. Hence the agencies that tend to 
make a state local, tend to make its religion the same ; and so 
rigorous has the relation between these two ever been that 
while no being has been more migratory than man, no re- 
ligion born with or within a nation has been either able or 
willing to change its home. For outside the place of its birth 
it would lose not only its historical continuity, but its per- 
sonal identity. Hence the migration of customs, beliefs, and 
myths is one thing, and the migration of religions is a different 
thing altogether. Men, or even tribes, may borrow a term or 
imitate an institution, but a structure which has been built 
up by a multitude of local agencies, operating through more 
generations than man can reckon, must stand where it has 
been built, and can be removed only by being taken to pieces. 
And so the religion a people has made must remain that 
people's, and cannot become another's, for the simple reason 
that its transference would involve the uprooting of the whole 
historical order and consciousness of one race and their im- 
plantation in the soul of another. 

2. But these were not the only difficulties which the 
Christian religion had to overcome ; of a different but still 
more radical order was this : it had to create the people it 
needed out of old materials, ancient races, who had lived 
in every kind and variety of state, who had been born in 
countries distant from each other and reared under different 
climates, and who had been accustomed to religions ranging 
from the most austere monotheism to the most indulgent 
polytheism. It found no virgin consciousness in which to 



522 HOW TO UNITE RACIAL DIFFERENCES 

sow the seed of its ideas and usages, but had to form its 
people out of men who had no national unity, no common 
ancestry, no affinity of blood, speech or experience ; in a 
word, nothing in their past to lead them to live together and 
think alike. On the contrary, each man who entered the 
new society was a focus of centrifugal energies. The Greek, 
acute, speculative, fastidious, metaphysical, had endeavoured 
to think of God either as He was in philosophy, as an ab- 
stract substance or a law of reason ; or, as the plastic arts 
had represented Him, as an idealized man, godlike because 
beautiful ; or, as the imaginative mythology conceived Him, 
as protean and stupendous in shape, but mixed in character 
and achievement. The Roman, civil in temper, political in 
genius, military in ambition and by habit, had conceived the 
Deity through the imperial idea, as typified in the Emperor 
and as defined and sanctioned by the State. The Persian 
or the Phrygian, touched with the oriental mysticism 
which construed existence as a kingdom under the rival 
forces of light and darkness, spirit and matter, good and evil, 
had been wont to divide the functions of God between a 
Creator who formed, but did not love man, and a Father who 
redeemed him and was not always able to save. The bar- 
barian, who confounded ecstasy with inspiration and religion 
with exhilaration, could best appreciate a God who liked the 
oblation and the exuberant fertility of man. The Jew, who 
knew himself to be a son of Abraham, wished, even after his 
conversion, to believe in the God who had established the law 
and spoken through Moses and the prophets, who loved the 
circumcised, hated idols and condemned the ways and 
thoughts of the heathen. The men who constituted the 
people of the religion were thus varied in type and without 
any of the unities of thought and mind which come from 
centuries of organized co-existence and the cumulative effects 
)f a long and jealously guarded inheritance. Hence came 
the problem : How out of the mixed families of man, the 



IN MAN WITH A UNIVERSAL RELIGION 523 

multitude of tongues he speaks, the strongly marked societies 
and castes, the opposed States and kingdoms, the rival 
religions and civilizations which at once make up the human 
race and isolate its parts from each other, could a people be 
evolved and organized into the social unity or the homo- 
geneous society needed for the expression and realization of 
a universal religion ? 

§ II. The Social Ideal of Jesus 

I. We have said that this was a new and peculiar problem, 
and we may add that it was one which no statesmanship 
could have solved. The solution, if it was to come at all, 
could only be effected by the energy of some constitutive 
idea acting in the mind. The inseparability of the religious 
and civil provinces and customs was, indeed, an ultimate 
axiom of thought to the societies and States of antiquity. 
Philosophical sects were common, and so were private and 
family cults, but these were conceived not as supersessive or 
prohibitive, but as supplementary of the public and legal 
worship. Indeed, the notion of a religion which appealed to 
man as man, and had no regard to racial, social, or class dis- 
tinctions, was quite alien to ancient thought. Rome, in ex- 
tending her empire, had spread her law but not her religion ; 
she was, indeed, here more inclined to imitate older States than 
to require of them acceptance of her deities and observance 
of her rites. The ideal city of the Greek thinkers was a 
Greek State, incapable of realization by any other than Greek 
men. And so the last thing Greece and Rome could have 
imagined was the possibility of realizing a religion without 
some State, with its national customs and sanctions, as its 
basis. But the ideal of Jesus was altogether unlike these. He 
had lived so modestly within His own little world, He and it 
so corresponded, it so occupied His activities, and He found 
it so sufficient as an arena for His career, that we can hardly 



524 THE IDEAL AND METHOD OF JESUS 

think of Him as nursing vaster ambitions than had ever 
dawned on the imagination of any statesman or warrior of 
mtiquity. And we do not so think of Him, for ambition is 
not a word that can with any propriety be used to charac- 
terize anything He designed or conceived. But the more we 
study the more we admire what He proposed to do, and the 
way in which He proceeded to do it. For Jesus had both a 

social ideal and a social method ; the ideal was expressed in 

His notion of the Kingdom of God, and His method was the 
way He took to realize it. The ideal may be defined as 
perfect obedience towards God, embodied in perfect duty 
towards man. Obedience signified that man knew God as 
Jesus knew Him and had made Him known, loved Him as 
Jesus loved, and therefore obeyed as He obeyed. Apart from 
this attitude — i.e. unless God was pleased with man, and man 
was reconciled to God, — obedience was not possible ; and the 
relation to God determined the duty towards Man, for God 
could not be loved and the creature He loved be hated. Thus 
love to one's neighbour was but active and applied love of 
God ; and this love was the law of the Kingdom. It was a 
universal law, knew no distinction of caste or country, Jew or 
Samaritan. It was a law possessed of inexhaustible energies ; 
it could never live as if it had said the last good word and 
performed its final good act, but must ever impel man for- 
ward. It was an imperious law, for it could never allow a man 
to suffer or to perish which the soul by dying might save. 
And it was necessary, for without it no help could be effec- 
tive nor could any effort be restorative. This germinal and 
governing principle developed into a multitude of special 
laws, as (i.) the law of beneficence : men were to return not 
evil for evil, or even good for good, but good for evil ; no one 

— —was to have the awful right of sitting in the judgment seat of 
God, or the devilish power of compelling us to harm him by 

..——being harmful to us. (ii.) The law of reciprocity : we were to 
do unto others as we would have others do unto us : our soul 



HIS STATE: ITS LAWS AND ORGANISM 525 



was to stand in their soul's place, and we were to act as if-"' 
they were we and we were they. (iii.) The law of charity : 
we were not to judge lest we should be judged. Judgement 
was the function of God ; the Pharisee over against the Pub- 
lican showed how pitiable man became when he tried tcr 
appraise himself and his neighbour, (iv.) The law of forgive- 
ness : man was to forgive his brother, not once or twice, but 
as often as he needed to be forgiven, certain that where all 
offended no one could be blameless, (v.) The law of ends or 
motives : the real sin is not the outer act, but the mind that 
wills the act, and the end that moves the will. Adultery is 
not a deed, but the lust to do it. (vi.) The law of self- 
denial : man is to surrender himself and all he thinks he 
rightfully possesses, that he may have nothing of his own, but 
may hold all of Christ, and hold it for Him and for the service 
of man. (vii.) The law of redemption : man is not to live 
as one who is to be ministered unto, but as one who is the 
servant of all, bound to save even by the sacrifice of himself. 
These are but a few of the laws of the Kingdom, which is a 
society of mortal men living as sons of the eternal God, 
with all their relations realized in time, yet all conceived as 
eternal. Men are neighbours to each other, but God is the 
one and absolute Sovereign ; and all that they do to each 
other they do unto God. 

2. Now this ideal may seem ethical rather than religious, 
more concerned with duty to man than with the worship of 
God. And without question it has some omissions that appear 
the more extraordinary that we cannot think them to have 
been undesigned. Jesus seems to conceive the cultus as the 
least part of religion, most abused when taken for the whole or 
for the most essential part. He teaches man to pray, but for 
Himself He prays apart. He visits the Synagogue, reads the 
Scriptures, and speaks to the people ; but He prefers to teach 
on the mountain, or in the fields, by the wayside or at the sea- 
shore. He speaks of the altar not as if it consecrated the -^^ 



526 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL IS SOCIAL 

gift, but as if the consecration depended on the spirit of the 
giver. 1 He makes prayer avail not because of the place 
where it is offered or the person who offers it, but because of 
\— the offerer's own heart. 2 For the priest as priest, the temple 
as temple, the ritual as ritual, He had no respect ; but only 
for the mercy that was greater than sacrifice, the piety that 
was better than ceremonies. What His people came to re- 
gard as their supreme religious act was a social observance, a 
supper which recalled an event in the life of Israel in which 
the priesthood, as such, and the temple as temple, played no 
part, but where the worship was domestic and the father was 
the priest. Yet it would be to misconceive His whole spirit 
and purpose to say, " The ideal of Jesus is not so much re- 
ligious as ethical " ; on the contrary, it is so intensely ethical 
because so essentially religious. What concerns Him is that 
man should think rightly of God and do justly to man. If 
they so think and do, they will worship as they ought ; if they 
refuse so to do and think, no worship they can offer will be 
agreeable to Him, and no regulations of it will be good and 
efficacious. There is nothing so certain as that the good man 
will worship ; for him the most expressive form is the one 
most congenial to his spirit ; and there is nothing more cer- 
tain than that a bad man may scrupulously observe every 
ritual prescription without being any the better for all his 
observances. Jesus, in harmony with His own mind and 
practice, laid emphasis on the Spirit, what the man is to 
God and does to man, certain that where there is concern 
for the weightier matters of the law, the lighter will not be 
neglected. 

1 Matt. v. 22-24. The argument in xxiii. 19 — cf. whole context 13-24 
— is ad hominem, and has no force if the Pharisaic thesis and attitude be 
taken away. 

2 Luke xviii. 10-14. 



THE METHOD WAS AS WAS THE IDEAL 527 

§ III. The Social Method of Jesus and its Impersonation 

1. The social method corresponded to the social ideal ; 
Jesus created a people for His religion by teaching men 
to become like Himself. He called them into His society, 
made them His disciples, which simply means men who could 
learn of Him ; He lived with them, threw over them the spell 
of His character and influence, opened their eyes by His 
words and example, woke them to admiration, roused them to 
love. Discipleship did not mean attainment, but the capacity 
to attain, the fidelity that could follow, the sympathy that 
could appreciate, the susceptibility that could imitate. But 
this method depended on His personal being and presence : 
without Him it could have no existence, with Him it was of 
necessity. Now the fact we have to deal with is this : — the 
method continued in operation after the Crucifixion, and men 
became Christians by becoming disciples of Jesus. He called, 
and their response was termed conversion. And so His 
society did not die when He died, and what kept it living was 
the belief in His continued and active existence. This is the 
fact that stands out clearly amid the confusions of the first 
days. Peter preached that Jesus had not seen " corruption," 
but was exalted to the right hand of God as " a Prince and a 
Saviour." 1 The resurrection was not a mere physical miracle 
but a spiritual experience ; it meant that Jesus lived and 
reigned as " both Lord and Christ." The belief emboldened 
Peter and John to refuse, on the ground that they must obey 
God rather than men, to be silenced by the priests and rulers ; 2 
and in its strength the Church stood the test suggested by the 
prudent diplomacy of Gamaliel. 3 The men who saw " the 
Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" believed that, 
since His presence had ceased to be local and visible, it had 
become universal and spiritual ; and so they awoke to the 
duty of commanding in His name all men to repent, of calling 
1 Acts ii. 31-36 ; v. 31. 2 v. 29. 8 v. 38-39. 



528 APOSTLES FOLLOW CHRIST'S METHOD 

all into His discipleship. In the belief that He still lived 
Stephen died ; it was a vision in which he saw the Lord that 
converted Paul. When persecution came and compelled the 
disciples to choose between Jerusalem and Christ, they chose 
as men who saw the invisible. The choice drove them out of 
Judea, and forced them either to be dumb or to preach His 
name to the Gentiles. They believed and therefore preached ; 
and this raised questions as to His authority which they 
answered by placing Him high above Moses, and by so modify- 
ing, in spite of themselves, Jewish customs as to suit non- 
Jewish men. Soon the sole note of their society came to be 
faith in His Name ; yet they did not by escaping from Judea 
escape from persecution. The rabble in the Greek cities 
proved even more intolerant than the Jewish priesthood ; but 
the preachers only the more openly " placarded " Jesus Christ 
crucified before their eyes. 1 Municipalities, anxious to keep 
the peace, threw them into prison without trial ; " lewd fellows 
of the baser sort " gathered together against them and set 
cities in an uproar 2 ; philosophers argued as if they were 
ignorant men and dabblers in matters too high for them ; 
tradesmen whose crafts were in danger became enthusiasts 
for the goddess whose shrines they made and sold ; but love 
of the invisible Sovereign proved mightier than fear of all 
visible powers. In short, the idea organized a people for the 
religion in the face of difficulties both inner and outer, those 
within being even more insurmountable than those without. 
Racial temper, for example, is one of the most obdurate and 
invincible things in man, and in no man more than the Jew ; 
but this idea so changed and humanized the strongest son of 
that strong race, that he declared there were in Christ neither 
Jew nor Greek, neither barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free,- but 
only the family of saints, the household of God. It so over- 
came the antipathies of blood and culture and speech that 
Greeks and Jews became kinsmen, and the richer sent to the 

1 Gal. iii. I. ols Kar' ocpdaXpovs 'Irjcrovs Xpicrrbs irpoeypdcpr) icrTavpaip-ivos. 
2 Acts xvii. 5. 



BUDDHA'S SOCIETY AND CHRIST'S 529 

poorer saints the help they needed. Newer ideals never work 
without friction, and wherever an old order is dissolved con- 
fusion reigns before a new one can be built up. We see in 
churches like Corinth how this happened ; but we also see 
how the spirit of potent love worked like a healing grace, 
begot ethical ideals that rebuked ethnical customs, and 
was silently making a society that had been indifferent to 
good, careful of virtue. The people who accomplished 
these things had no arms in their hands, yet they faced with- 
out dismay the mightiest of all armed powers, and when it 
proudly commanded them to worship its gods as well as their 
own, they said : " Command us as a civil sovereign in civil 
things and we will dutifully obey, but speak to us as a 
religious authority and we will not listen to you. You may 
kill, for you have the power of life and death, but here you 
cannot command and shall not control. To our own Master 
we stand or fall, but that Master is neither the Emperor 
nor the Senate of Rome, He is Jesus Christ." 

2. But before we can fully appreciate this ideal and method 
we must compare them with what may be conceived as actual 
or possible alternatives. Buddha had founded a church as 
well as a religion ; indeed, in his case these may be termed 
one and the same. His ideal was an ascetic and celibate 
community : monks who, as weary of the world, took refuge 
with the Buddha and his order ; and nuns who, though as 
women disliked and distrusted, had still as human beings 
established their right to consideration at his hands. In no 
point is his want of originality so apparent as here ; he simply 
borrowed the idea of discipleship from the Brahmanical 
schools, made it express the ideal state, and framed the 
regulations which their and his experience had proved to be 
necessary. His community was to be vowed to poverty ; his 
saint was to be a mendicant without worldly goods or am- 
bitions, industrial energies or occupation. He was to cease 
to be a father or brother a husband or son a citizen or neigh- 

P.C.R. 34 



53Q MOST ORIGINAL OF FOUNDERS 

bour ; he was to wear a special dress, to abstain from many 
vices, but also from many duties ; to live the profitless life of 
one whose sole end was to seek beatitude, and whose function 
was to show how it could be attained. What we should call the 
lay world was held to be only nominally and potentially of 
the religion, being needful to the maintenance of the mendi- 
cant community and the source whence it could be supplied 
with celibate members. But essentially, the man who had 
not made the great renunciation stood only in the outer court, 
where he waited the illumination that was to lead him within 
If he was reverent, he was judged worthy to have the bowl 
passed to him ; if impious the bowl must be withheld, i.e. he 
was not fit to contribute to the support of the monks who 
preached to him concerning the vanity of all human things 
Now if Jesus had been no more original than Buddha, there 
were sects or schools enough for Him to imitate. There 
were the Essenes, pious men, ascetics, cultivating purity and 
poverty, " honouring God most of all," and after Him Moses, 
whom no man must be allowed to blaspheme. They believed 
in the rigorous regulation of life ; in avoiding the touch of the 
uncircumcised ; in bodily washings ; in the scrupulous observ- 
ance of the Sabbath ; in abstaining from certain kinds of 
food ; in eating only what clean hands had cooked ; in being 
their own priests and offering their own sacrifices. If He had 
avoided the Essenes, He could have found many types of the 
theocratic ideal, Maccabaean, Apocalyptic, Pharisaic, popular 
and Messianic. Such an ideal had crossed His mind in the 
vision which showed Him " all the kingdoms of the world." 
Later it was to become the ideal of Mohammed ; and he was 
so to organize his Church that while it was built on the Word 
it yet should like a State wield the sword ; and by the use 
of these two it converted Arabia, subdued kingdoms, and 
founded Empires. But Jesus, more original and daring than 
either of these, conscious of a function for man which re- 
sembles nothing so much as the function of God in creation, 



HIS SOCIETY ARTICULATES HIS PERSON 531 

disdained all positive laws, whether regulative, ceremonial, 
administrative or coercive, and founded His society simply 
by discipleship. 

3. But the significance of His social ideal and method be- 
comes apparent only when they and the idea of His person 
are looked at together. The person may be described as His 
social ideal embodied and organized for the creation of His 
society. The ideas He impersonates become the ideals it 
articulates ; in other words, He is the Symbol of all it ought 
to be. His people were to be like Him, sons of God ; and as 
He was " Son of Man " His society was to know no distinc- 
tion of blood or birth or estate, but to be the home where men 
were to be born and nursed as children of humanity. As He 
impersonated the race before God, He also so personalized man 
to His Church that to live unto Him was to live for all man- 
kind. As He saves by bearing the sin which was not His 
own, so His people must sorrow and suffer and die if they 
would save men. The apostle who conceives Christ as the 
Second Adam, the Head of the New Mankind, conceives the 
Church as His body, all its members being related to each 
other as well as to Him. Their life is His, their actions are 
inspired by Him, and it is only through their relation to Him 
that they can perfectly realize all other relations and faith- 
fully fulfil all duties. In other words, His society was meant 
as His articulated person to be as ethical as Himself. In 
Hebrews His people are the people of the New Covenant, 
with the law of God written in their hearts, made by their 
faith independent of time, and lifted into fellowship with the 
Church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven. 
In the Apocalypse His society appears under a most winsome 
figure : it is " the bride of the Lamb," arrayed in bridal gar- 
ments ; or, yet again, it appears as a multitude of saints 
redeemed " out of every tribe and people, nation and tongue." 
Possibly the last thing John and Paul thought of as they 
laboured to interpret the person, was that they were creating 



532 WHAT IS A POSITIVE RELIGION: THE 

an ethical ideal for a universal society ; but it is not the self- 
conscious workman that accomplishes the grandest work. 
And no man ever did greater things for humanity than those 
who interpreted Christ into its ideal, personal and social. 

§ IV. The Christian not a Positive Religion 

I. The argument here touches one of the supreme and 
differentiating distinctions of Christianity : it is a personal 
but not a positive religion. The term "positive" is juristic 
rather than theological, and was introduced into theology 
by a distinguished lawyer who desired to construe the 
relations of God and man in the categories of his own 
science. It denotes an enacted, as distinct from a natural, 
law; the legislation which an established authority, whether 
personal like king or emperor, or representative like a Senate 
or Parliament, has promulgated and enforced, in distinction 
from the order, which nature is supposed to have constituted, 
the equity which issues from conscience and speaks in its 
name. Positive is public law, proclaimed and upheld by 
some public authority. Now founded religions are by the 
very necessities of their origin, positive, i.e. they express 
some will ; their beliefs are, as it were, public laws ; their 
whole order is a legislation authoritatively enacted. Hence 
the religion of Israel, conceived as the creation of a lawgiver, 
is positive ; but the older Semitic cults, which no statesman 
instituted or reformed, are natural. Buddha, in forming his 
Sangha or Church, and framing the laws as to dress, diet 
and social relations according to which his people were to 
live, founded a positive religion. So did Mohammed when 
he made the Koran the law for Islam ; for his authority s 
ultimate, his words express God's will, and all we can know 
of God is what he has made known. But Christ is not 
related to Christianity as are these creators to the religions 
that bear their names. The pre-eminence belongs to His 



SPECULATIVE IDEA AN ETHICAL IDEAL 533 

person, not to His words ; His people live by faith, not in 
what He said, but in what He is ; they are governed not by 
statutes He framed, but by the ideal He embodied. In other 
words, His religion is an evolution of belief, not a product 
of authoritative legislation. Hence the extraordinary sig- 
nificance of His person, which, till it was interpreted, was 
but the immanent possibility of a religion. Hence, too, the 
value of the speculative idea to the ethical ideal ; it was the 
universal Man of the one that created the potent humanity 
of the other. And so while positive legislation, like Buddha's 
or Mohammed's, emphasized the differences between those 
within and those without their societies, the Christian idea 
emphasized their common humanity. Through the Man 
who was all mankind, all men became kin. The idea that 
He who saves is not so much an individual as the collective 
race, compels His people to feel that in His presence all 
differences of blood and colour and caste vanish ; that to be 
a man is to be His, redeemed by His death and passion ; 
and that where He has loved we dare not cast out or despise. 
The people were not constituted like a state by positive 
law, but by those affinities of the Spirit which faith begot 
and developed. 

2. But this method of constituting the people involved a 
correlative method of government. The ultimate sanction 
of positive law is the physical penalty. The magistrate is 
able to enforce obedience because he bears the sword. The 
idea of a free State is freedom to make its own laws, but 
not that its citizens are free to break the laws which have 
been made. Once the collective will has legislated, all 
single wills must obey ; and if any one refuses obedience 
he will soon find the legislative become not a friendly and 
protective, but a hostile and retributive power. Though 
the bases of authority may be moral, yet the sanctions or 
penalties it uses to enforce its authority must be physical. 
The sovereignty of Christ, on the other hand, is in basis 



534 CHRIST IS LORD OF THE CONSCIENCE 

and form, in precept and sanction, rational and moral. He 
h governs man as an idea and an ideal, i.e. through his 
reason and by his conscience. Hence belief is a material, 
but polity is a formal question ; imitation of Christ is 
essential, but church is more or less an accident of time 
and place. A man need not be either a monk or a 
Churchman to be a Christian ; but if he be a Christian 
he may be both, or either, or neither. He may be a 
master or servant, a soldier or statesman, a merchant or 
mechanic ; but he must be a man who obeys the Sovereign 
of his soul. The society that is not free to form its own 
^polity lives in bondage to tradition and custom ; but the 
rule of God is made possible only by the exercised and dis- 
ciplined freedom of man. And so the immediate result of the 
spiritual sovereignty was the creation of conscience in re- 
ligion, and with it the rise of a higher social and civil order. 
For the ancient mind so identified religion and State that no 
citizen was conceived to be at liberty to refuse to do honour 
to his country's gods ; it was a grave act of treason not to 
worship the image or the symbol the emperor set up. Where 
this notion prevailed no change in religion was possible, save 
by means of a civil revolution ; and out of it came tyran- 
nies, hypocrisies and vices too many to enumerate. Christ's 
"--method left the man in his old world, but changed the man ; 
and the man He changed He made so loyal in all civil 
duties, while so hostile to civil control over his conscience, 
that the State, to maintain itself, was forced so to change 
its functions and readjust its claims as to be able to in- 
clude the man. These things are a parable, but they illustrate 
the wisdom of the action which, instead of constituting a 
people by positive, separative regulations, created one by the 
method of discipleship and faith in a transcendental idea. 

3. The social ideal thus created and realized by the idea of 
Christ's person had four characteristics : (i.) His people were 
gathered out of all nations without any respect to blood or 



AND THROUGH IT HE GOVERNS MAN 533 

rank or caste ; they were called simply as men, and con- 
stituted into a new mankind, (ii.) They were so organized 
according to the idea of His person, that they may be de- 
scribed as, symbolically, its articulation, (iii.) As such they 
represented Him and continued His work. What this work 
is ought to be construed, not through the offices of organized 
religion, but through the character, the words and the 
history of Jesus Himself, (iv.) The most distinctive qualities 
of this society, its attributes and activities, were, like Christ's 
own, ethical, and consisted in a worship and service of God 
which ameliorated the state of man. Where the civil and 
military ambitions, the ceremonial and sacerdotal functions 
of the old States stood, the humane beneficences of the new 
people were now to stand. If His Church had conformed 
to His ideal, had followed His method in His Spirit, who 
can tell what man would have been to-day? All we can 
say is, the vision of the seer of Patmos, 1 who saw the king- 
dom of the world become the kingdom of our God and of 
His Christ, would have been infinitely nearer fulfilment than 
it is. 

1 Rev. xi. 15. 



CHAPTER II 

IDEAL RELIGION AND THE IDEA OF GOD 
§ I. The Idea of God in Religion 

i. T TOW or under what conditions may the belief in one 
J- -i- God be incorporated in a universal religion ? To 
discuss this question we must resume certain positions already 
argued : (a) that a single universal religion is possible, but 
only through the belief in one God ; (/3) that the belief may 
exist without the religion, though not the religion without the 
belief; and (7) that the incorporation can happen only 
under certain terms or conditions, such as (1) that God is held 
to be equally accessible in all places, to all peoples and per- 
sons ; (2) that the terms on which access is granted are cap- 
able of fulfilment by all men ; and (3) that He has a character all 
can trust and qualities all can reverence. These principles 
imply others still more fundamental, such as (a) the correlativity 
of our knowledge of God, of nature, and of ourselves ; (/3) the in- 
dissoluble connexion between the conception of God as a moral 
Being and the facts of our moral nature ; (7) the co-ordination 
of His responsibility for us with our responsibility to Him, His 
responsibility being increased rather than lessened by the 
existence of evil ; and (3) the witness borne (1) by man's 
universal search for God to His search for universal man ; 
(2) by the universality of the religions to the possibility of 
a universal religion ; and (3) by the action of the higher reli- 
gious ideas on man to his need of the highest of all ideas in its 
highest form in order that he may attain his most perfect state. 

536 



HOW MAY IDEA OF GOD BE REALIZED 537 

2. How, then, is this highest of all ideas to be worthily realized, 
i.e. incorporated in a religion which does justice to its intrinsic 
qualities and capabilities ? There is nothing so easy as to 
change an idea in philosophy, nothing so near to the impossible 
as to change an idea in religion. What reason created reason 
can uncreate ; what human nature has made can be unmade 
only by the dissolution or reconstruction of the nature. And 
religious beliefs have not only a more indestructible life, but 
a vaster potency than philosophical ideas. They have lived 
longer and gathered strength from their years ; they speak to 
man and to more of him, with a more audible and more 
familiar and intelligible voice. If we try to represent a deity 
as he appears to those who worship him, how innumerable 
are the figures of speech we must employ ! He is the highest 
known power, yet he is in the hands of those who address 
him. His interests are so theirs and his inclination such that 
if they but do the thing he approves, he will do what they 
desire. What he is to them he has been to their fathers ; 
their history is the story of his action ; their good fortune tells 
of his favour, their calamities tell of his displeasure. The 
events which sum up the meaning of life are associated with 
his name ; the birth which promises continuance to the 
family, the marriage which brings it enlargement, the death 
which makes the living desolate, yet gives them dignity by 
binding their moment of being to the eternal. If they con- 
tend in battle, they ask him for victory ; if they are confronted 
by famine, they beseech him for food ; if their enemies perish, 
they sing his praises ; if pestilence and death walk abroad, 
they appease his wrath. If they have imagination, their 
delight is the poetry that exalts his majesty and his power ; 
if they are emotional, they either cultivate the mysticism that 
seeks absorption in him, or they offer the gifts that administer 
comfort by assuaging fear ; if they are moral they put themselves 
under discipline and train themselves into asceticism and self- 
denial. There is no mood that the god who lives in the reli- 



538 THE UNITY AND MORALITY OF GOD 

gion does not speak to, no conviction or affection, no passion or 
prejudice to which he does not appeal. It is no wonder, then, 
that the change of an ancestral and national deity is one of the 
rarest things in history ; and it is the rarer because in this 
region, where the ideas are all ideas of the reason, reason so 
seldom reigns, or reigns with shut or blinded or veiled eyes. 
Hence what may be to the thinker an obvious truism will be 
to the zealot or the devout person a " damnable heresy." 1 

Two things are to us so self-evident as to deserve the name 
of inevitable ideas, viz., the unity of God and His moral char- 
acter ; yet how does the case stand as regards the religions ? 
Take the Unity. Monotheism is a very late and an infrequent 
faith. With that curious subordination of history to theory 
which distinguished him, Comte made Monotheism the last 
step in the first of the three stages through which man passes 
in the progress of his knowledge. But, as a matter of fact, 
Monotheism is a belief relatively recent ; it has not been uni- 
formly reached, was reached not by any general consensus, but 
by a small and exceptional fraction of the race, a single desert 
tribe, from whom all civilized men have received it. To-day 
Polytheism extends far further than Monotheism, for it is 
easier and more natural to man to embody in everything the 
Divine which he finds everywhere, to localize it, to split it up 
as it were into a multitude of definite and tractable individ- 
uals, than to refine it into an infinite personality, too abstract 
to be felt. But unless God be One He cannot be moral ; in 
a multitude of deities morality is dissolved, for each of the 
multitude being divine has his own laws and does what is 
right in his own eyes. It is a matter of history that Polythe- 
isms are by nature either unmoral or immoral. It is hard for 
us to conceive any sort of vice as godliness, or a pious man as 
other than virtuous. But our difficulty, which is due to cen- 
turies of Christian discipline, is one no ancient Greek would 
have felt, and no modern Hindu, or any modern savage who 

1 2 Peter ii. I. 



ARE RARE IDEAS IN RELIGION 539 

worships as nature bids him, would feel. We must have one 
God before we can have the idea of a moral deity whose will 
is absolute law. But the moment this point is gained we are 
faced by difficulties of another order. On the one side the 
philosopher lays hold of the Monotheistic idea, elaborates it 
logically, reduces it to an abstraction, translates it into the 
terms of the schools, names it Substance or Entity, Nature or 
Humanity, the Infinite or even the Unknown ; but the idea so 
transformed has ceased to be the living God which religion 
needs in order to live. On the other side there operate the 
sensuous temper and tendencies of the people. They cannot 
have a God afar off, they must have Him near at hand, mani- 
fest, palpable, living to spirit by being real to sense. Hence 
even within Christianity we find the energies of the Deity and 
His means of intercourse with man placed in stones, in tem- 
ples, in images, in rites, nay, in the very garments men may 
wear as they worship. Men, indeed, will make anything into 
a god, if so be they can get command of the god they fear. 

§ II. Christ 's Interpretation of God 

The abstract question, then, with which our discussion 
began, now assumes a much more concrete form : How far 
may it be justly claimed that God, as interpreted through 
Jesus Christ, has become, or is capable of becoming, the God 
of a universal religion ? The positions assumed from our 
previous argument are : (a) The creative pre-eminence in 
religious history of Jesus Christ ; (j3) the special type of 
religion embodied in His character and life ; (7) the inter- 
pretation of His person by Himself, His disciples and 
apostles as containing (1) distinctive ideas of God and man ; 
(2) the terms on which God comes to man, and man can find 
access to God ; and (3) the modes in which man may 
worship Him. 

One or two points suggested by the phrasing of the 



540 THE INTERPRETER DOES NOT SUPERSEDE 

question must be considered, (a) God is said to be inter- 
preted " through Christ," not "by" Him. Interpretation "by 
Christ " would be limited to His teaching, what He said 
as expressing what He thought concerning God; but inter- 
pretation " through Christ," while it does not exclude the 
teaching, includes the person and character as well ; what 
others thought concerning God because they thought as they 
did of Christ. (/3) To interpret God is not to create man's 
knowledge of Him, though it may be to correct or perfect 
that knowledge. Men had known God and believed in Him 
before Christ came, as they still do where they have never 
heard of Him. Without the knowledge that existed before 
and apart from Him, the interpretation could not be under- 
stood. This means that He stands in an order governed 
by law, that He completes a process which has been going 
on ever since the birth of man, and still goes on wherever 
man is. Christ is more of a response to a nature dissatisfied 
with its own discoveries and knowledge, than an absolute 
miracle which violates all that nature's laws. (7) The God 
He interprets is not an object of speculative thought, the 
causal or the synthetic idea of the nature we study ; but He 
is an object of veneration, a Being man seeks to know that 
he may love and worship. What we have to do with, then, is 
not the metaphysical reality or philosophical warrant of the 
belief, but its religious value and efficiency, whether it has 
power to displace the ideas which the local cults have throned 
so firmly in the soul, and whether it has the qualities capable 
of organizing a fitting form for man's highest and most 
potent idea. (8) The interpreter brings to more perfect 
knowledge the God in whose name He speaks, but does not 
supersede Him. While He Himself was construed as the 
God within God, the hands as it were by which Deity held 
and guided and saved humanity, yet He was not, in spite of 
strong tendencies to the personification and apotheosis here 
of an abstract nature, there of an ethical quality, set as an 



THE GOD HE INTERPRETS 541 

independent and isolated Divine Being over against the God- 
head. And this is the more remarkable as supersession is 
a process so common in the religions as to be entitled to be 
termed uniform and constant. It finds barbarous expression 
in Greek mythology, especially as it is found in Hesiod. 
Zeus, though the father of gods and men, is himself a son 
who supplanted a father, who had attempted to keep his 
supremacy by devouring his own offspring. In the Rigveda 
we can trace the process by which Indra displaces Varuna, 
just as he had earlier stepped into the seat of Dyaus, and 
as all the gods vanished later into the bosom of Brahma, 
the youngest of the Vedic deities, who yet with his name 
slightly changed, so as to denote the highest philosophical 
idea, swallowed up all the older gods. In the Mahabharata 
we see Krishna rise, attain fame, climb from manhood into 
godhood, though the qualities and feats held to prove him 
divine are very manlike indeed ; and he attracts to himself, 
as he sits amid the high gods in the Hindu pantheon, peculiar 
honours and a special cult. But Christ reveals or interprets 
without superseding Deity, enhances His grace without 
lessening His dignity. He does not break up the unity of 
God, for divided or individuated being is never claimed for 
Him. His own achievements do not form into a glory round 
His head, eclipsing the eternal Father. On the contrary He 
at once infinitely enriches and unifies the object of worship. 
He interprets without either superseding God, or reducing 
His majesty, or dividing His honour. 

§ III. The God Christ Interprets a Universal Ideal 

How far, then, may we say that God so interpreted through 
Christ is a Deity who could not be known and worshipped 
without forming a universal religion ? 

I. Let us note the action of the Interpreter on the idea. 
God was dissociated from a special State and associated with 



542 GOD DISSOCIATED FROM A STATE 

a person ; and this person was conceived as the symbol of 
humanity, an epitome of mankind. It is the characteristic of 
all ancient and unreformed religions to be tribal or national 
— for the nation is but the larger tribe ; and the tribe loves its 
religion and reveres its god because they are its own, and are 
so bound up with its order and customs that their dissolution 
could only signify its destruction. If a stranger wishes to be 
admitted to the favour of the god, or the practice of the 
religion, he must become a member of the tribe, rebirth or 
naturalization being the only way to participation in its 
most solemn rites. The sanctuary was ever the spot most 
jealously guarded against the curious and prying alien. But 
Christ, as the interpretative personality, detached God from 
the customs of the tribe, and attached Him to the idea of man. 
There is nothing so universal as the individual who is the 
whole in little, as there is nothing so exclusive as the family 
which must, to maintain its being and its claims, keep its 
blood pure. But Christ, construed as the ideal of humanity, 
shows what God intended to be to every man, and what 
every man ought to be to God. He is an illimitable yet 
concrete and historical person ; and as such He is at once 
the type of the man who alone can please God, and the 
symbol of the idea that one has only to be a man to be 
God's, and that the more fully He inhabits us the more com- 
pletely human we become. The family from which Christ 
sprang disowned Him, and the act which cut Him off was 
like the truth told in parable : it meant that God had ceased 
to be the property of a people, and become the possession 
of mankind. 

2. The change in the medium through which God was 
known involved a correspondent change in the way He was 
conceived, i.e. since Christ stood for man without any dis- 
tinction of race, God, as interpreted through Him, was loosed 
from the qualities that bound Him to a peculiar people. The 
attribute of will which had been emphasized to justify His 



AND ASSOCIATED WITH MAN 543 

choice of Israel, fell into the background, and grace, which 
is will spontaneously seeking the common good, came to the 
front. Christ was Son of God in no figurative or incidental 
sense, but essentially ; and as the moment never had been 
when there was no Son, so there had never been, and could 
never be, a moment when there was or should be no Father. 
Thus love and fellowship, affinity and affection were bound 
up with the very being of God. He could not be conceived 
as loveless thought, or as abstract substance, or as almighty 
energy, so long as the terms Father and Son could be used 
to denote eternal facts and relations essential to His Deity. 
But even more significant was the correlative change in the 
conception of His manward activities and relations. To 
conceive the typical Man as essentially Son was to be driven 
to think of humanity in the terms of sonship. If by the 
very constitution of His being God was a Father, man by 
the very fact of his creation in Christ was constituted a son. 
And if collective man was God's son, it followed that God 
was man's Father, and so there stepped into the place of the 
tribal deity the universal Fatherhood. Before we can guess 
what this signified, we must have studied the spirit, traced the 
history, watched the action and the effects of the religions. 
To see how they have created caste, sanctioned and magnified 
the pride of blood, emphasized the distinctions of colour and 
race, justified the inhumanity of man to man, and then to 
discover how a religion has been based on a Fatherhood too 
universal either to know or to show " respect of persons," is 
as if one were suddenly taken from the study of crippling 
disease to the contemplation of sunny and buoyant health. 
The provincialism which justifies the jealousy and injustice of 
deity, his partiality for his own race, his insincerities and even 
ferocities to other races, directly hinders the birth and the 
growth of the idea of humanity, and encourages the terror 
which regards blood as the proper food of the gods. But 
when man thought of God in the terms of ideal humanity, as 



544 MAN DIGNIFIED, GOD HUMANIZED 

impersonated in Jesus Christ, his religion was at once uni- 
versalized ; the more thoroughly he believed, and the more 
piously he worshipped, the more humane he became in faith. 
The religion which did honour to the God who loved all men 
required the service of all mankind. 

3. But the conception of man was changed as well as that 
of God. We may without extravagance say that man had 
never come by his rights in religion ; for either, where God 
was great and of infinite majesty, he had been humbled into 
the dust ; or, where God was very terrible, he had been degra- 
ded into an instrument that could be broken and cast away, 
or depraved into a coward who would offer the fruit of his 
body for the sin of his soul ; or, where God was complaisant, 
he had taken him into his own hands and done with him as 
he pleased. To find a fit relation or a seemly equilibrium 
between God and man is a thing hard enough to be esteemed 
impossible, yet this was what Christ achieved. He made 
man stand upright before God, conscious of his dignity. It 
does not become a being of infinite promise to lie prone 
in the dust, even before the Infinite Majesty. To feel what 
it is to be the eternal Father's son, is to learn to behave as a 
son, possessed of his privileges as well as bound by his duties ; 
and it is also to feel that all sons are equal in their potential, 
though not perhaps in their realized worth. Hence the 
Christian idea created two novel notions as to man : the value 
of the unit and the unity of the race. The ancient nations 
that most valued their collective existence attached least 
value to the individual man. If he was a slave, he was but a 
chattel ; if he was an alien, his own gods might care for him, 
the native gods had other and better things to do. If his colour 
or his stature was not theirs, he would be described in terms 
more appropriate to a brute than to a man ; and if his worship 
was noticed, his gods were said to be devils rather than deities. 
Refinement, intercourse, the decay of the martial spirit and 
the rise of the great empires may have created in the West 



THE SANCTITY OF MAN AND LIFE 545 

a milder temper and more restrained speech, but they did not 
add to the dignity of the individual. We admire the pyramids 
and temples of Egypt, but forget the misery of the men 
whose forced labour built them, or the pride of the king who 
wanted a splendid mausoleum, and thought, if he thought at 
all on the matter, that to sacrifice some thousands of men 
in building it made it all the fitter a tomb for a king. And 
so it seems to China, with its hundreds of millions of men, 
as if the waste of man by disease or the fierce forces of 
nature mattered little ; there is the more to divide among 
the living if there are fewer mouths to be fed. We never 
cease to wonder at the art and literature of Athens, both 
so perfect in form, but we seldom imagine what is meant 
by the simple fact that when her life was bravest and her 
struggle hardest she had barely five thousand citizens, while 
of her slaves twenty thousand could desert to the enemy. 
Roman law was remarkable for its love of justice and its 
care for human rights ; but to the Roman law the slave was 
a thing and no man, while Roman men were never so pitiless 
to others as when they were most concerned about their own 
privileges. And to-day the Hindu judges life by other 
standards and reads it with other eyes than ours. To him 
indeed life, simply as animal life, is sacred, a thing which 
he must not destroy ; yet the feeling of its sanctity does 
not extend to the human personality, at least as the West 
understands it. If he argues as the divine charioteer in the 
Bliagavadgita does, he will hold that since man's being is 
indestructible, a mere moment in the circle of everlasting 
change, killing is no murder ; but he may add for himself 
that to lose one's life in trying to rescue others from the 
jaws of famine and pestilence, is a most needless ex- 
travagance of mercy. The Englishman is — because of his 
passion to save the lives of men, combined with his pleasure 
in killing wild animals, a pleasure great in proportion to the 
wildness of the animal — a standing puzzle to the Hindu ; but 
P.C.R. 35 



546 MAN ENHANCED IN VALUE 

if he only could read the Englishman through his religion, he 
would see that the enthusiasm for the saving of men was the 
point where Christ had touched him, and made him so 
different in religion from what he is by nature. By nature 
he kills the tiger for sport, delights in perils and adventures, 
and finds amusement in facing or causing death in the jungle ; 
but by religion he has become one who would die to save a 
man from death, whether he be a man of high caste, or of low 
caste, or of no caste. And how is it that man has become to 
the higher Christian peoples a being of such infinite pos- 
sibilities and incalculable value that he must cease to be a 
slave, and be protected in his life and in his rights, however 
mean his nature and low his culture ? How has it come about 
that the most truculent of races has come to act as if it were 
a fitter and more heroic thing for a man to sacrifice himself in 
saving life than to assert himself in destroying it ? There is 
but one answer possible : it is due to the idea in his religion 
which holds him most strongly, and which never, whatever 
may happen to his faith, quite loses its grasp upon his 
conduct, that he ought to do for others what Christ did for 
him. He may die for man, but he cannot despise him. If 
he believes that Christ took his human nature, he must also 
believe that He dignified the nature He bore. Man seen 
through His humanity becomes a being of transcendent value ; 
the nature which has been put of God to the most gracious 
of all uses is a nature that can be no more despised or mis- 
handled. To the strong it was an imperious duty to help the 
weak, and a thing sternly forbidden to destroy the brother 
for whom Christ died. And so the religion began as a 
recreative humanity, which made it impossible to the parent 
to expose his child, or to the crowd to make holiday in the 
amphitheatre where the trembling man was thrown to the 
wild beast, or to the freeman to hold a brother man as his 
slave. 

But this value of the individual needed for its full signifi- 



AND AS A RACE UNIFIED 547 

cance another and correlative idea, the unity of the race. 1 
The most abstract of ideas was here destined to prove the 
most potent of practical beliefs. One person conceived as the 
symbol or epitome of man, in whose life all lived, in whose 
death all died, achieved the unification of mankind. The 
unity as it was held in ancient philosophy, especially by the 
Stoics, was a noble doctrine, but it remained a doctrine, an 
ideal which is an abstract; it did not walk about in the market- 
place and deal with actual men. But the unity which Christ 
embodied was not ideal only, it was ethical and actual. The 
churches came into being as attempts to realize it, and these 
attempts grew into a fuller consciousness of what it signified. 
Ideals may take centuries to grow into realities, but they do 
grow, and the nearer the realities come the more infinite do the 
ideals appear. And this is pre-eminently true of this belief. 
We are but beginning to understand the responsibilities 
and obligations which lie upon the whole family of man for 
each member, and which lie upon each member for the family 
as a whole as well as for its several parts. Humanity as a 
whole was responsible for the sufferings of Christ, but though 
He suffered at its hands He was not free to inflict upon it 
suffering. On the contrary, His grace bound Him to submit 
that He might conquer, to die that He and His might live. 
He saw that sin as collective, inherent and inherited, rooted 
in nature and by nature propagated, was more a misfortune 
than a crime, and that sin as personal, active and expressed 
in acts, was a crime, though it might begin in misfortune. 
And He further saw that while it was the nature of the evil to 
harm the good, it was the duty and function of the good to 
save the evil. And so as the blameless Brother of a guilty 
family He bore the family's guilt, so bore it that all might 
learn of Him how to escape the sin that was sorrow and 
caused death. 

Ante, pp. 444 ff. 



548 FAITH AS IT IS IN THE CHRISTIAN 

§ IV. The Condition of Realization 

1. But quite as significant as the ideas is the condition of 
their appropriation, the act and attitude of mind — for it is 
both — termed faith. It is an intellectual act, for it is a form 
of knowledge ; it is an emotional attitude and activity, for it 
trusts persons and works by love ; it is a moral intuition, for 
it sees obligation in truth and right in duty. It is not a 
single or occasional act, though it may be compared to a 
vision which for a moment looks into eternity and never 
forgets what it has seen ; but it is continuous communion 
with the things the vision saw. Faith as knowledge studies 
the historical person, but as belief it sees in the ideal the 
symbol of God and the universe. The historical person is 
studied as if He were the realized religion, and He must be 
known that He may be imitated and obeyed. The ideal is 
contemplated that the soul may stand face to face with God, 
and endure as seeing Him who is invisible. In both aspects, 
as knowledge and as vision, faith is a receptivity ; it is man 
standing open to the touch and action of the eternal, yet 
as also sensitive and active, holding fast to what has been 
received. Its antithesis is the work which creates merit, 
the action which establishes a claim to reward ; but its corre- 
lative is grace, the spontaneous energy of the God who made 
man for Himself, effecting His conscious appropriation by the 
man He made. 

2. Now faith, so understood, is an idea most character- 
istic of the Christian religion ; in no other does it hold the 
same place or fulfil the same functions. This is, no doubt, 
partly due to the kind and quality of the associated ideas ; it 
belongs to their household, has the face and features distinct- 
ive of the family. But this only emphasizes the distinction of 
the religion as a religion. Those before and around it were 
constituted by acts and customs rather than by beliefs ; and 
were more methods of approaching God than ways by which 



AND IN OTHER RELIGIONS 549 

He could approach us. They threw the burden of reconciliatijn 
on man and bade him do the things or use the means that 
would give him acceptance with God. The Christian was the 
first religion, as a religion, to say that custom has no worth, 
that work has no merit, that the only thing that can avail be- 
fore God is the righteousness He gives and faith receives. In 
Greece, religion was a matter of oracles and shrines, of festivals 
national and civil, of conformity to law and custom, as both 
Protagoras and Sokrates found to their cost. Men might be- 
lieve in the value of certain acts or the efficacy of certain 
institutions ; but religion was too nearly identical with these 
to lay much stress on the faith that trusted the truth and 
acquired no merit. Its absence in the religion is reflected in 
the schools, where it has no recognition in a religious sense 
till we come to Proclus, who, in what is more a borrowed than 
a native tongue, speaks of faith as higher than knowledge and 
better than love, for love leads us only to the beautiful, but 
faith to God. The Roman worship consisted pre-eminently 
in expressions of joy, in lays and songs, in games and dances, 
and, above all, in banquets, " being grounded essentially on 
man's enjoyment of earthly pleasures, and only in a sub- 
ordinate degree on his fear of the wild forces of nature." x 
In India the customs and laws of religion surround a man 
from his birth, govern his life as a whole, as well as its indi- 
vidual parts, his childhood, youth, manhood, and old age, his 
years, his months, his very days, but faith is no part of it. 
Certain philosophical sects have indeed made of Bkakti, 
which under one aspect is devotion, and under another 
faith, a cardinal doctrine ; but while they may have known 
it, the multitude of religions we call Hinduism has not. The 
notion was native to prophetic Hebraism, and was fitly 
associated with the promise and its ethical Monotheism ; but 
institutional Judaism was too much concerned with the acts 
and articles of worship to care for faith. Hence Christianity, 
1 Mommsen's History of Rome, i. 221. 



550 A QUESTION AND ITS ANSWER 

in making faith the subjective pivot of religion, separated 
itself from uniform and invariable custom, boldly made itself 
independent of usage and institution, and brought the in- 
dividual man and the absolute God face to face. It was the 
only mode in which a religion of universal ideas could have 
been realized by universal man. 

This discussion leaves us with a question we must ask, 
though we shall not attempt to give it the answer it deserves 
and requires : What precisely did Christ, by these ideas and 
the condition of their realization, accomplish for religion? It is 
a small thing to say, He made a universal religion possible ; it 
is a greater thing to add, The religion He made possible is one 
that ought to be universal, for its ideal is the humanest and 
the most beneficent that has ever come to man. He com- 
pletely moralized Deity, and therefore religion; and so made it 
possible — nay, obligatory and imperative — to moralize the 
whole life of man, individual and collective. His moral ideal 
expressed the beneficence of an infinite will, yet as imperson- 
ated in what we may term an actual yet universal Man. It 
was transcendental as God, it was immanent as mind ; and 
as incarnated in a religion, it concentrated the energies of 
the eternal for realization in the modes of time. If this can 
be said of Christ, what higher work could be ascribed to God ? 



CHAPTER III 

THE IDEAL RELIGION AND WORSHIP 

WORSHIP as we have seen 1 is as essential as belief to 
religion. The man who thinks of God, if he thinks 
truly, must worship Him, for without this even nature would 
not be content. But is worship possible without some in- 
stitution ? and is an institution, which must bear the marks of 
time and place, possible in a universal religion ? and what is 
a religion without worship save a philosophy or a system of 
more or less reasoned ideas ? 

Worship and belief differ in the nature and tendency of their 
action in religion ; belief is the freer and the more expan- 
sive, worship is the more traditional and local. Thought is 
more open and accessible to new influences than custom, 
changes its forms more easily, and gains more by the change. 
And hence the frequency of such phenomena as the religion 
of Israel exhibited — the conflicts of the universal, the Mono- 
theistic idea, with the local and consuetudinary, the spirit and 
institutions of the tribe. 2 Now these latter represent two 
forces or tendencies, a localizing, embodied in a place, and an 
externalizing, embodied in institutions. 

§ I. Place as it Affects Worship 

I. The holy place is perhaps the last and most inveterate 
of the forms which tribal particularism assumes. It may be 
described as the spot or the structure where the people of a 

1 Ante, pp. 480-481. 2 Ante pp. 244-257. 



552 WHY PLACES BECOME HOLY 

religion feel that they can offer the most acceptable 
worship to their God. Its sacred character is seldom due to 
a single cause, though complex causes may from some simple 
occasion become active. If we take the word "reason" as 
subsuming both cause and occasion, we should say that the 
reasons why a place becomes holy may be described as either 
physical, mythological, traditional, or historical. The physical 
reasons, though they never act without the impulse of a be- 
lief which is seeking to become articulate, may be a cave, as 
at Delphi ; or a well whose waters have some peculiar virtue, 
as in the case of the innumerable holy wells of ancient religion 
and mediaeval legend, or whose springs make an oasis in the 
desert, as at the shrine of Jupiter Ammon, which Alexander 
visited ; or it may be a tree through whose murmuring 
branches the god is heard to speak, as at Dodona. The myth- 
ological reasons, which never act without the physical, are the 
beliefs which place the gods either on special mountains, 
as the Greek seated his on Olympus or the Hindu his on Kai- 
lasa, the Himalayas, " formed by Visvakarman, in colour like 
a brilliant cloud and decorated with gold," whence they could 
hurl the thunderbolt or blow from their nostrils the devour- 
ing blast ; or in some forest glade, where life does its silent 
but creative work, like the Germans of Tacitus, who " lucos 
ac nemora consecrant, deorumque nominibus appellant se- 
cretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident," 1 or like the Arician 
" templum nemorale Dianae." 2 The traditional reasons may 
be the association of a district with some person or event, like 
the birth of a god, the burial of a saint, the wisdom of a 
teacher, or a miraculous appearance of deity ; and to this class 
of places belong those regions of the Nile, where the weeping 
Isis wandered in search of the dismembered Osiris ; Mathura, 
where the Yadavas thought Krishna achieved divine fame ; 
Benares, where the dread Siva rolled the mighty river which 

1 Germania, ix. 

2 Ovid, Ars Amat. i. 259 ; cf. Fasti, vi. 59 



THEIR ACTION ON THE RELIGION 553 

had descended out of heaven upon his head ; Ayodha, holy 
land of the Buddhists, where the Master was born and made 
the great renunciation ; and the multitudinous Catholic shrines 
where, as at Lourdes, the Virgin has appeared to some devout 
and ecstatic maid. The historical reasons belong either to the 
life of a people, like those that made Jerusalem, because the 
city of their great king and the capital of their race, seem 
to the Jews the fit home of their God ; or to the recorded 
experiences of some person, like those that made Mecca, the 
city where his youth had been passed, where his ancestors had 
dwelt, and whither the tribes of Arabia had for centuries 
gone to high festivals and such worship as they knew, so dear 
and so delightful to Mohammed. 

Now, under these varied forms, different as they may 
seem, the action of place is in two respects the same, it local- 
izes and it externalizes, working the more disastrously the 
purer and the broader the religion is. Thus sanctity comes to 
have a physical cause, bodily contact with the sacred object 
to have a specific religious value. The water that flows past 
the place becomes sacred, and to bathe in the Jordan or the 
Ganges, to drink of the well Zem Zem, or of the spring where 
the saint quenched his thirst, or above which the Virgin ap- 
peared, is either to be cleansed from sin or to acquire peculiar 
merit. If the pilgrim cannot go to the water, it can be 
brought to him ; and for a price he buys his reward. The 
spot which the god touched, the cell where the saint lived, the 
cave where the prophet hid can be seen and handled ; and 
the pilgrim feels as if he had done honour to the god and 
become worthier of heaven. The multitudes who go on pil- 
grimage are composed of persons intent on performing a 
religious duty, but they soon grow mixed, and the more 
mixed they grow the less devout they get, till what began in 
fervour may end in licence and riot. The people who keep 
the holy places grow as holy as they ; priests increase, live 
on the alms and offerings of the faithful ; and the industry of 



554 PLACES IN JUDAISM AND ISLAM 

the place centres in the religion, and it becomes a commodity 
made and marketable, represented by articles that can be 
bought and sold. And so relics and memorials which can 
make his worship efficacious are manufactured, legends are 
invented to enhance the reputation of the god and the re- 
ligious value of the place. The inevitable outcome is a 
materialized and localized deity and a coarsened worship. 
And this is a saying every holy place in the world illustrates 
if it does not justify. 

2. But here it is necessary to distinguish : a local cult may 
suit the genius and type of a religion just as a side chapel falls 
in with the design of a cathedral ; but it is an altogether different 
matter where the religion is universal in idea and intention, 
while the place where men must worship, if they would 
worship acceptably, is but one. There are two examples of 
this inconsistency between idea and place, Judaism and Islam, 
but with most significant differences. Jerusalem was sym- 
bolical of the Jew, and though it perished he survived, and 
his God so survived with him that ever since they have dwelt 
together, God inseparable from the people and the people 
from God. To Mohammed, his people and land were alike 
holy ; the Arab was to conquer the world, but not to forsake 
Arabia ; thither, however far he wandered, he was ever to 
return, and the races he subdued to the faith were to come as 
pilgrims to the city of God and His prophet. But the suc- 
cess of the Arab arms destroyed the sanctity and separateness 
of the Arab people, though it only enhanced the sacredness 
of Mecca. The city towards which the Moslim pray is a 
city their feet must stand within if they would see God. 
But this localization of the highest act of worship keeps the 
religion racial, oriental, semi-barbaric, governed by Arab 
standards, ever confounded by the offer to physical endurance 
and achievement of those rewards which should be reserved 
for spiritual excellence. Emancipation from place is thus a 
necessity in the case of a religion that would be co- 



CHRIST SUBSTITUTED FOR PLACE 555 

extensive with man, and sufficient for his nature and its 
needs. 

3. Now this emancipation Christ achieved, and His is the 
only religion which has achieved it. The association of wor- 
ship with His person completely dissociated it from place, and 
it became possible to approach God anywhere, provided He 
was approached through Him. For union with Him needs 
but faith ; the man who believes in the Son of God is iden- 
tified with Christ, and when he worships it is as if Jesus 
worshipped. Since the act that relates the soul to the person 
through whom it finds acceptance is inner and spiritual, 
place and time are alike irrelevant, the spirit and the truth 
are all in all. Hence, too, the one medium is more ample 
than an infinity of local media, for their variety affects many 
things, — God, the sort of worship He approves, the acts that 
constitute it, the persons by whom and through whom it 
may be offered. A multitude of shrines means a multitude of 
deities, and not simply of men and the homes where they live. 
The man who worships the Virgin or prays to St. Joseph 
for a boon to himself or an evil to his enemy, who goes on 
pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Antony at Padua, or seeks 
from St. Francis at the Portiuncula healing for body or 
soul, finds in each place a different god, a being complexioned 
by the medium through which he is approached. But the 
one Mediator does not lower God to the sensuous needs of 
variable man, rather lifts man into the spiritual mood in which 
he feels his kinship with God. And the union of apparent in- 
compatibilities in His person made it all the fitter a medium 
for this high purpose. He inhabits no place, yet He fills all 
time, which means that there is no spot where He cannot be 
found and no moment without His presence. He is as in- 
visible and impalpable as God, yet as audible and tangible as 
man ; and, we may add, to form an image of the image of 
the God no man can see is impossible. And it is unnecessary, 
for the Soul of Him, whom the art of no graver and the chisel 



556 HOW IMAGES DEPRAVE IDEALS 

of no sculptor can represent, lives incarnate in speech which 
all men can hear or read. 

And this has a high significance; the pictures which men 
delight to paint, or the statues they carve of Jesus on the 
cross or in the tomb, and which women love tearfully to 
kneel before, are not images of the Christ, nor in any sense 
representations of Him. There is nothing that fills me with 
darker horror or deeper aversion than the apotheosis of 
wounds and death which the Roman Church offers as its 
image of the Christ. Some months ago I stood in an Italian 
cathedral ; it had been built by the wickedest, the fiercest, the 
most pagan, and probably the most learned of the Malatesti. 
Within it was the sarcophagus which held his remains, with 
his mocking inscription graven upon it, and the chapel 
where reposed those of his mistress Isotta, whose initials 
interwoven with his own were carved on every pillar and 
boss ; while without in another sarcophagus are deposited the 
bones of Gemisthus Pletho, which he had proudly brought 
from Greece in days when men had been taught to seek 
miraculous virtue in the most gruesome relics of mortality. 
In this church, with a hideous moral heathenism looking out 
from every figure and line, what was conceived to be an act 
of Christian worship was going on. A crowd of priests was 
marching round, one at their head carrying a cross on which was 
fastened a contorted figure, together with nails, a hammer, a 
saw, and a pair of pincers, while from one of the beams hung 
a ladder of ropes. As the crowd paused to chant their 
monotonous strain before each altar, bending themselves and 
their symbol towards it together, I could not help saying, 
in what was not pride but utter humiliation of soul, " Your 
worship is not mine, nor is your God ; and as for this cross 
you carry, it speaks rather of the wickedness of the men who 
slew the Saviour than of the grace of Him who saves man 
by His love." For how is it possible to make an image of 
Him without carnalizing a form that must be spiritual to 



HOW WORSHIP DEFINES DEITY 557 

be true ? He is a type, an ideal, a symbol, which expresses 
at once the grace of the infinite God, and the promise, the 
potency and the inexhaustible possibilities of man. In His 
face divine pity shows, the tenderness of the everlasting 
Father as He looks out from an eternity that knows neither 
the haste nor the passion of time ; and yet while the pity is 
divine the face is human, and speaks of man made by God 
for God, touched with the shame for sin which the pure 
alone can know, the sorrow for misery which none but the 
blessed can feel, the horror for death which only the 
dweller in immortal light can experience. And this is the 
person, " all glorious within," who has emancipated religion 
from the tyranny of place by teaching us that "he who 
hath seen Me hath seen the Father." 

§ II. The Institution as it Affects Worship 

I. The institution is the second and most potent of the 
forms under which the tribal spirit may affect religion. 
The term denotes all the customs and usages which con- 
stitute the local worship, or which determine the times and 
regulate the conduct of its several parts. Now the insti- 
tution, so understood, is more potent in its action than the 
place ; for it speaks more directly and authoritatively of God 
and to Him, describes His character and attitude to man, 
as well as what man's character, and what his attitude to- 
wards God ought to be ; what he must do and what agents 
and agencies employ if he would please Him. In the wor- 
ship therefore, as a consuetudinary or regulated system, the 
idea of God is presented in its most definite, concentrated 
and constant form ; the worshipper learns, by doing the 
things which authority has declared and usage sanctioned 
as the most agreeable to Deity, what the Deity is and what 
kind and order of man He most approves. 

While the ideas that underlie religion and organize its in- 



558 THE MORE CEREMONIAL WORSHIP GROWS 

stitutions differ, qualitatively and formally, almost to infinity, 
yet in one respect all worships agree, they are methods of 
approaching and pleasing God, means by which man seeks 
access to Him, tries to win His favour and gain His peace. 
Of course in the very way taken to reach Him, and the 
acts done, and the things offered in His honour, there is a 
most subtle yet concrete indication of character ; but differ- 
ence here does not affect the point of agreement : all worship 
aims at establishing harmony between two wills, God's and 
man's ; whether it be by influencing man to surrender his 
will to God's, or by inducing God to do the will of man. These 
two may indeed imperceptibly shade into one another, but 
the rule is this — the lower the idea of God, the more He is 
conceived to be in the hands of man, but the higher the idea 
of Him the stronger becomes man's desire to leave himself in 
the hands of God. 

2. If now the function of worship and its relation to the 
ideas of God and religion have been correctly described, it 
follows that this is the point where religion affects man and 
man religion most potently and most constantly. What its 
effect on character is to be does not depend so much on the 
idea of the relation between the persons as on the idea of the 
persons related. In the abstract worship ought to be the 
moment of most penetrative and illuminative exaltation in 
man's life, and it will be this if God is the highest and the 
holiest Being he can conceive or desire ; but this it will not 
be if he simply seeks from God some advantage to himself 
which he can obtain from no other person or will. The 
advantage need not be material, may indeed be forgiveness 
of sins or acceptance of the person ; but the mischief will 
be radical if the attempt be made to purchase it by offering 
to God something that will please Him in order that He 
may do something that will benefit us. For a God from 
whom anything can be purchased has fallen from the high 
estate of deity, who must give out of free grace if He is to 



THE LESS MORAL RELIGION BECOMES 559 

be honoured. If worship be conceived not as adoration 
of the only and absolutely adorable, but as giving a quid 
pro quo, then it becomes an effectual means of deteriorating 
religion and depraving man, and assimilating God to what 
in him is most depraved. And the more the externals of 
worship — the acts it consists of, the offerings it brings, the 
persons who present them — are emphasized, the more it bears 
this character and does this work. As a matter of fact the 
ancient religion whose worship was most domestic and least 
official, was the most lucid, imperative and impressive in its 
ethical teaching ; while those religions that made most of 
priesthood and sacrifice were also those that most neglected 
the humaner and higher virtues. The highest ethics of the 
Rigveda are associated with the name of Varuna, and in his 
days the rishi or poet potently sang his praise, and the priest 
was only a shadow and a name ; but in the later Sanskrit 
literature, as, say, in the epic which celebrates the deeds of 
Rama and the Law Book which bears the name of Manu, the 
tendency that began with magnifying sacrifice has ended in 
the decay of ethics, the death of all ideas of duty towards 
man as man, and the apotheosis of caste. Greek philosophy 
was a noble teacher of morals, but what ideals of good or 
justice do we owe to Greek religion ? The Roman State 
jealously guarded the dignity and sacred character of the 
priesthood, and proudly supplied the college of pontiffs with 
" robes of purple and chariots of state," but had it not been 
for the Stoic teaching, especially as it affected Roman law, 
and the deification of the Empire, what would have become 
of Roman virtue? In Israel the conflict of prophet and 
priest reached its acutest issue in the idea of worship. What 
the one cultivated and delighted in, " the multitude of sacri- 
fices," " the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts," 
" the blood of bullocks or of lambs or of he-goats," ' the 
other despised and abhorred. The sacrifices the prophet 

1 Isaiah i. 11. 



560 CHRIST IS THE ONLY INSTITUTION 

praised were those of joy and righteousness, of a broken and 
a contrite spirit. The notion that God was the Being whose 
mind needed to be changed, and that the change could be 
effected by things that could be purchased, a proper animal 
properly selected and properly killed, burned and offered 
by proper hands in the proper place, was a notion fatal to 
the ethical nature of religion and its power to create moral 
men. The more religion is bound to a special class of per- 
sons who officiate at special times and seasons, the more these 
persons become distinguished not by character but by de- 
scent, not by spiritual purity but by ceremonial cleanness, 
not by moral eminence but by distinctions of office and 
habit. And these things do not make for a high or a uni- 
versal ideal in religion ; on the contrary, without their aboli- 
tion one could not be realized. The only institution possible 
in a universal religion must be an ideal ; and Christ is at once 
an historical and a symbolical person. As the one He shows 
what the worshipper ought to be, as the other He is the cause 
of acceptable worship. 

§ III. Christ the only Institution for Christian Worship 

I. Now it is here where the discussions as to Christ's death 
and as to the emphasis laid upon it by Himself and His 
apostles will be understood. It was said that His person 
was conceived as an institution ; and this signified that all 
the conditions and means needed by man for the perfect 
worship of God were realized in Him. He fulfilled the law ; 
the ideas which the Levitical system showed in shadow He 
made substantive and final, realized " once and for ever," He 
was " the great High Priest," and in His priesthood He was 
alone. No one stood or could stand by His side. He was the 
sole Sacrifice needed by man or required by God, and offered 
through the Eternal Spirit. He lived for ever and His sacrifice 
for ever availed, for the temple where His priesthood was 



FOR CHRISTIAN WORSHIP 561 

exercised was eternal in the heavens. And He fulfilled the 
prophetic as well as the Levitical ideal. He was " the Lord 
our righteousness," the cause and means of man's acceptance 
with God, achieving the forgiveness of sins and the life ever- 
lasting. He was thus a whole institution of worship ; in 
Him God was reconciled, in Him man was accepted, and He 
with the right arm of His Divinity round man, and the left 
arm of His humanity round God held the two together, know- 
ing and known. 

2. From this position several consequences follow. 

i. Christ is the sole institution for worship which has 
divine authority in the Christian religion. He is the only 
Mediator, and no intermediation is provided for, though means 
to introduce man to the knowledge of His functions may be 
lawful and expedient. Hence His office does not exclude 
such minor or ancillary help as the weakness of man, his 
peculiar temper or stage of culture, may demand. These may 
be necessary to him while not essential to the religion, but 
they are permissible only as aids to the apprehension of 
the truth. The cardinal fact is the sole sufficiency of Christ ; 
the man that comes unto God must come through Him, and 
through no other. 

ii. The Eucharist is not in the strict sense an institution for 
worship, but a condition of higher fellowship, a means of 
communion. Through it the man speaks in symbol to his 
"great High Priest" and the Priest speaks to him ; but this is 
not to worship God, though it may be to be better qualified 
for His worship. The reference is to the sacrifice, to our 
participation in it, to our dying in Christ in order that He 
and we may live together ; but what this signifies is that the 
more we become in the sight of God and in our own ex- 
perience one with Him, the fitter we are to worship God. 
The man who can most perfectly praise and serve God is 
he who can most truly say : " It is no longer I that live, but 
Christ that liveth in me." 

P.C.R. 36 



562 THE EUCHARIST AND THE WORD 

iii. What is true of the Eucharist is also true of preaching, 
though it has a larger function and a more clearly recog- 
nized place in the chain of secondary causes. Tt has more 
of the essence or soul of worship in it ; for it creates the en- 
lightened intellect and the quick conscience, without which 
there can be no worship of a moral Deity. Jesus Himself 
was a preacher, formed preachers, and commanded them to 
do as He had done. The apostles were preachers, and while 
there is in all the apostolical writings but one explicit 
reference to the Eucharist, the Word is everywhere ; to preach 
it was what they lived for, and the means by which the 
Churches lived. And this signifies that Christ appealed to 
faith ; and the Christian lived by faith, and faith is know- 
ledge, and knowledge is the exercised reason. He had 
nothing to fear, nay, He had everything to gain from the 
awakened intelligence. The slothful and the sensuous mind is 
His last enemy, which the preaching of the cross was meant 
to destroy. In the apostolic age this preaching was a 
" stumbling-block " to the Jew and " foolishness " to the 
Greek ; but unto the called, whether Jews or Greeks, it was 
" Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." What 
antiquity could have easily understood was a religion made 
up of offices, customs, and usages ; what it could not under- 
stand was a religion whose only institution was a person 
realized by faith. 

iv. In forming and founding this institution for worship 
the initiative was God's and not man's. It contradicted the 
belief that had governed man's action towards Deity and 
determined the acts and forms of his worship, viz. that 
God's mind needed to be changed and could be changed by 
gifts and sacrifices. The belief is venerable, — if age could 
authenticate any opinion this were the truest man has ever 
held ; and it is common, — if to be believed everywhere, always, 
and by all make a belief true, this one could not possibly 
be false. And it is of all the beliefs known to religion 



WORSHIP DOES NOT RECONCILE GOD 563 

the most pernicious , out of it has come the notion 
that God was harsher than man, that He loved blood 
and could be appeased by it ; that man by satisfying 
His lust of death could buy from Him pardon and good will. 
The notion has been incorporated in multitudes of cults, hab 
been coarsened and refined as it has dominated man or been 
subdued by him ; but it has held its ground in the religions, 
most of all in those whose elaborate institutions, sacrificial 
and ceremonial, have been the proudest work of its hands. 
But the Christian idea reversed and undid all this. God it 
conceived as by nature merciful, immutably gracious in 
will, while man was the being who needed to be changed. 
Hence its very essence was stated to be " a ministry of recon- 
ciliation," and this was explained as " God in Christ reconciling 
the world unto Himself," * or as " God commending His love 
toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for 
us." 2 The new institution for worship thus made God a real 
God for mankind. It may be that the old belief is not dead 
yet, that it still survives even in Christian societies, but it lives 
as the old Adam lives in the new man, the survivor from 
a more ancient world, out of harmony with its living en- 
vironment. 

v. The institution defines the kind and quality of the 
worshipper. He is to have the mind of Christ, to be an 
imitator of Him. While the worship is made possible by His 
death, His life shows what makes the worshipper acceptable. 
Here the value of His sinlessness appears : He is the ideal 
Man, and the Christian is to be in his own age what Jesus 
was in His. The New Covenant was created by a moral 
Person for the creation of moral persons. If the sacrifice 
shows how much God did for man, the life shows how mucl- 
He expects from man. He saves the sinner that He may 
form him into a saint. 

vi. The function of the worship is to qualify man to 
1 2 Cor. v. 18-19. 2 Rom. v. 8. 



564 WORST HERESY AS TO THE PERSON 

fulfil the divine purpose. It has an ultimate and a proximate 
end ; the ultimate end is the glory of God, the proximate is to 
form the good man, but this is conceived as the way to that. 
In worship the man adores God, and he can adore only as he 
knows and admires ; and God penetrates the man, becomes 
the energy of his will, or the soul of his soul, the heart of his 
heart, until it can be said : " Lo ! God is in the man, and is 
using him to achieve the salvation of the world." 

§ IV. Conclusion 

I. Here then our long and not untoilsome journey ends, 
though I feel as if these later discussions raised problems too 
imperious to be dismissed unresolved. Yet our conclusion 
must be of the most practical kind : — if we do well to speak 
of the history of Jesus and the interpretation of Christ as the 
programme of a religion, are we not bound to compare the 
performance with the programme ? The result may be humili- 
ation, for so much of the programme remains unfulfilled ; but 
also some instruction and enlightenment. The aggregation 
of the institutions and usages which we co-ordinate under the 
term " Church " round the central idea of the Christian faith, 
may have been inevitable ; but it does not follow that the in- 
evitable was the good, not to say the best. The Church which 
survived the Roman Empire was an assemblage of new ideas 
and of ancient customs that had proved their suitability to 
human nature by living in many religions and surviving many 
changes of culture and belief; and though it may have helped 
to preserve the Christian religion, yet it was at the expense 
of its higher ethical and finer spiritual qualities. The religion 
was saved by being assimilated to the world in which it 
had come to live ; but the assimilation has cost it centuries 
of impotence, of bitter controversies, and of struggles, more 
or less fruitless, to escape from the toils in which it had been 
caught. Even if Nicaea affirmed the truth as to the deity of 



IS ETHICAL NOT METAPHYSICAL 565 

the Son, it so did it as to help to form the Church into a civil 
state within the Empire and under the Emperor. Granted 
that Chalcedon rightly defined the two natures and joined 
them, properly distinguished and delimited, in the unity of 
the person, yet it conspicuously forgot alike in theory and 
in practice their ethical significance as to God and man. 
Would it not have been to the infinite advantage of the 
religion if these Councils had concerned themselves as much 
with the ethics as with the metaphysics of the person of 
Christ ; and demanded that the Church should realize the 
fraternity, the unity of classes and peoples, the faith, hope 
and charity, the obedience towards God and duty towards 
man it symbolized ? Even if we concede — -though the con- 
cession, to be just, would need to be largely qualified — that 
Augustine was right and the Pelagians were wrong, must we 
not also maintain that his jealousy for the pre-eminence of 
Adam and for the organic being of man in sin, made him 
miss the most splendid opportunity that ever came to any 
Father or thinker for so applying the sovereignty of Christ 
to the higher moral, social, and spiritual life of the race as 
to show how the Christian idea could fulfil the ideal of 
humanity? Luther preached justification by faith alone, 
but he failed to see that equality before God was incomplete 
so long as the Church showed respect of persons, bowing low 
before kings, but trampling as with iron feet upon the 
peasants they oppressed. There is indeed in all history 
nothing more tragic than the fact that our heresies have 
been more speculative than ethical, more concerned with 
opinion than with conduct ; that the Church whose claims 
are highest and most indefeasible in doctrine, has been the 
most prone to compromise in morals, consumed with jealousy 
for the honour and inalienability of the priestly office, while 
cynically indulgent towards the priestly character. But if 
Christ be rightly interpreted, the worst sins against God are 
those most injurious to man. His person is indeed a symbol 



566 THE IDEAL IN THE PERSON COMPARED 

of humanity in its double sense, as, subjectively, an emotion 
which becomes enthusiasm for the common good, and as, 
objectively, a race made one by the possession of a common 
and equal nature. Defined and explicated on its Godward 
side, the person yields a doctrine of God and redemption ; 
but on its Manward side, it becomes a theory of the race 
which it is the primary duty and main function of the Church 
to realize. The ancient usages — the priesthoods, the sacri- 
fices, the consecrations and transubstantiations, beliefs regu- 
lated by canon and discipline, enforced by law, as if it were 
an affair of state — which out of the old religions had stolen 
back into the Church, signified that the institutions the person 
had replaced were seeking to displace the person. They had 
on their side the innate and inveterate prejudices of human 
nature ; it had on its side the ideal which was the supreme 
dream of the religion, and it has proved its power by com- 
pelling its very enemies to do its will, even when seeking their 
own ends. 

2. The person, then, as institution made the religion 
universal in its aims and ideas, in its modes and action, and 
it has acted, in spite of the defective means and recalcitrant 
agencies it has had to employ, as became its high function. 
And what inference as to its constituents and character 
may be drawn from these discussions ? Our purpose was not 
simply to co-ordinate historical phenomena, but to discover 
the causes that produce them, the ends they serve, the laws 
that govern their order and their movements. And certainly 
no discovery has in it more promise of scientific satisfaction 
than the relation between the conception of Christ which 
makes His person the source and epitome of a religion, and 
the function He has actually fulfilled in history. For what 
is the principle fundamental to all science ? This : we do not 
live in a world where things come uncaused. We conceive 
nature as the realm where order and causation reign. 
Chance is a word science does not know. Accident is a 



WITH THE PERFORMANCE IN HISTORY 567 

term which only denotes ignorance. It is used because 
vision has not found the secret it searched for. The growth 
of science is the decay of chance ; when the one has finally 
prevailed there will be no place for the other. But order 
cannot reign in the nature now around man, and yet chance 
govern man himself; and if order reigns in history as in 
nature, then the great persons, who are in history what 
forces are in nature, must belong to this order, for they are 
the very factors by which it is constituted. But if we hold 
this most scientific principle, we must mark the inevitable 
question : — Can Christ stand where He does uncaused, un- 
ordered ? If He had not been what He was, and stood 
where He did, could anything in history be as it has been 
or as it is ? Is there any person necessary in the same sense 
as He is to the higher history of Man ? May we not speak 
of Him as the keystone of the arch which spans the gulf of 
time? But can we conceive that the keystone came there 
by accident ? or otherwise than by the hand which built the 
bridge, which opened the chasm and determined the course 
of the river that flows beneath ? And can the nature or 
character of this Cause be known? Causes are known in 
their effects, for cause and effect ever correspond in quality 
and character. This Christ, then, as He stands in universal 
history, accomplishing those marvels of the Spirit which we 
have seen indissolubly associated with His person and His 
name, is an effect ; and as He is the Cause of Him must be. 
Nay, more, is not the effect only as it were the cause embo- 
died, the old force, unspent, persisting in a new form? And 
how shall we express the idea in this case better than in the 
evangelical formula, " the Word became flesh, and dwelt 
among us " ? and how better describe His continuous action 
through all the centuries of our Christian experience than by 
the verse, " We beheld His glory, a glory as of the only 
Begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth " ? The 
grandeur which thus comes to His person transfigures 



568 THE RELIGION IS GOD IN CHRIST 

through it all nature and the whole history of man, and may 
well bid us adopt as our own the words which sum up the 
faith of an apostle, " God has been in Christ reconciling the 
world unto Himself." 



True Religion is no piece of artifice ; it is no boiling up of our Ima- 
ginative powers nor the glowing heats of Passion ; though these are 
too often mistaken for it, when in our jugglings in Religion we cast a 
mist before our own eyes : But it is a new Nature informing the Souls of 
men ; it is a God- like frame of Spirit, discovering it self most of all in 
Serene and Clear minds, in deep Humility, Meekness, Self-denial, Uni- 
versal Love of God and all true Goodness, without Partiality and without 
Hypocrisie ; whereby we are taught to know God, and knowing him to 
love him, and conform our selves as much as may be to all that Perfec- 
tion which shines forth in him. 

The Glory of the Deity and Salvation of men are not allaied by their 
union one with another, but both exalted together in the most tran- 
scendent way, for Divine love and bounty are the supreme rulers in 
Heaven and Earth. &66vos e£-a> Belov x°P°v icrarat. There is no such 
thing as sowre Despight and Envy lodged in the bosome of that ever 
blessed Being above, whose name is Love, and all whose Dispensations 
to the Sons of men are but the dispreadings and distended radiations of 
his Love, as freely flowing forth from it through the whole orbe and 
sphear of its creation as the bright light from the Sun in the firmament, 
of whose benign influences we are then only deprived when we hide and 
withdraw our selves from them.— John Smith the Platonist. 



INDEX 



Abraham, 248, 279 ; vision of 

(in the Koran), 280 
Abu Bekr, 286 

Acquired characters, trans- 
mission of, 72 
Acts, Book of, 297, 442 
Adam, 47 ; and Christ, 101, 301, 

445 ; and Eden, 204 
Aeschylus, 198 
Agnosticism, religious instinct in, 

197 
Alexander the Great, 407, 552 
Alexandria, school of, 254, 447 
Ambrose, 428 
Anarchy, a form of pessimism, 

116 
Anaxagoras, 246 
Anthropology, 187, 192, 195, 

204, 212 
Antony of Padua, St., 555 
Ape, The, history of, 42 ; and 

man, difference of, 45 
Apocalypse, date of, 297 ; idea 

of Christ in, 450, 475 ; His 

death in, 501 ; idea of the 

Church in, 531 
Apostles, and the Temple, 489 
Apotheosis in Apostolic thought, 

474 
Aquinas, analytic power of, 13 
Aristotle, 246, 387, 460 
Art and religion, 198 



Aryans, religion of , 217, 223, 230 

Asceticism, mediaeval, 114; of 
Schopenhauer, 125 ; of Bud- 
dha, 179, 274, 529 ; of the 
Essenes, 530 

Asoka, 281 

Assyria, religion of, 191, 193, 
220 ; empire of, 231 

Athanasius, on the Incarnation, 
19 ; on Antony, ^37 

Athens, slavery in, 545 

Atonement {see Christ, Death of) 

Augustine, 13, 19 ; on evil, 100 ; 
on sin and grace, 101 ; theo- 
logy of, 179 ; De Civitate Dei, 
299 ; on miracles, 337 

Ayodha, holy land of Buddhism, 
553 



Babylonia, religion of, 220 ; em- 
pire of, 231 

Bain, Professor, on matter and 
mind, 52 

Baur, 403, 427, 442 

Benares, 552 

Benedict, 263 

Bentham, his theory of morals, 

65 
Beyschlag, on \vrpov, 404 
Bhak Li, 549 
Bhagavadgita, 382, 545 
Boehme, 241 



569 



57Q 



INDEX 



Bolingbroke, Deism of, 106 

Book of the Dead, 239 

Brahma, 118, 219, 240, 541 

Brahmanism, 232, 242 ; com- 
pared with Buddhism, 273 ; 
and Mohammedanism, 277 
(see also India, religion of) 

Browning, quoted, 430 

Bruno, Giordano, 103 

Buddha, his environment, 118, 
271 ; his agreement with 
Fichte, 123 ; and Schopen- 
hauer, 125 ; personal quali- 
ties of, 126; story of, 272 ; 
and Brahmanism, 273 ; his 
Church, 273 ; his individu- 
ality, 275 ; humanity of, 276 ; 
myths concerning, 335, 472 ; 
his social ideal compared with 
the Greek, 369 ; and Christ's, 
483, 529 f. 

Buddhism, 7, 193, 262, 270 ff. ; 
its philosophy, 118, 230 ; idea 
of merit and demerit in, 120; 
a positive religion, 5325a mis- 
sionary religion, 233 ; not an 
atheism, 242 ; its moral order 
theistic, 243 ; compared with 
Brahmanism and Moham- 
medanism, 277 

Bunsen quoted, 229 

Buridan's Ass, jj 

Butler, on morals, 84 sqq. ; his 
Sermons and Analogy, 85 ; 
on the difficulties of faith, 
109 ; on moral evil, 150 ; com- 
pared with Kant, 84 

Byron's pessimism, 115 



Caesar, 407 

Caiaphas, characterized, 314; 
his statesmanship, 316; his 
view of Jesus, 314 sqq. 



Caligula, 344 

Calvin, theology of, 179 ; on 

the Agony, 428 
Caste in India, 232 
Categorical imperative of Kant, 

87, 123 

Categories of experience sup- 
plied by personality, 35 

Causation, Hume on, 25 ; in a 
pure naturalism, 28 ; in na- 
ture and in personality, 30 ; 
in nature a deduction from 
will in man, 34 

Celsus, 427 

Chalcedon, Creed of, 3 

Character, natural factors of, 

3" 
China, religion of, 192, 193, 266 
Chinese idea of man, 546 
Christ, the person of, a problem 
for the reason, 5 ; not a 
made mystery, 7 ; dialectic 
examination of, 8 ; literary 
and historical examination 
of, 10 ; defects of these 
methods, 13 ; idea of, 16, 18 ; 
absolute need of, 17 ; incom- 
patibility of, with pure natural- 
ism, 23 ; the historical and 
the ideal in, 477 ; epitomizes 
the mystery of Being, 478 ; 
contrasted with Buddha and 
Mohammed, 530 ; the uni- 
versal man, 550; the keystone 
of the arch of history, 565 ; 
His names, 324-26, 438, 446, 
449, 45o, 456, 457 ; Logos, 
the, 326, 452, 455 ; Son of 
God, 446, 449, 543 ; Son of 
man, 11, 397, 406, 475 ; 
Messiah, 398, 400, 412 ; " the 
suffering servant of God," 
398, 400, 501 ; Lamb of God, 
457, 469, 501 ; idea of as 
generative of the apostolic 



INDEX 



57i 



literature, 459 ; in Paul, 445 ; 
in Hebrews, 447 ; in the 
Apocalypse, 450 ; in John, 
451, 502 ; mythical theory as 
to the person stated and 
criticized, 467 ; the idea not 
invented by Paul, 460 ; affini- 
ties in Greek religion, 473 ; 
its historic source, the mind 
of Christ, 474 ; His teaching 
concerning His death, 395 ; 
the teaching offends the 
disciples, 400 ; as a ransom, 
404 ; as voluntary, 408 ; as a 
vicarious sacrifice, 499 ; its 
ends, 410 ; idea of, in Paul, 
492, 504 ff. ; in the He- 
brews, 494, 500 ; in 1 Peter, 
501 ; in the Apocalypse, 
501 ; how Christ creates the 
Christian religion, 295, 305, 
476 ; makes its ideas, 443- 
453, 460 ff., 541 ff. ; becomes 
its only institution, 481, 514, 
557; emancipates religion 
from the tribal Spirit, 555 
(see also Epistles, Gospels) 
Christianity, seems occidental 
to the Orient, 234 ; and 
Hebraism, 261 ; problem of, 
2 9S> 3°5 \ not a syncretism, 
518; creates a people, 521; 
not a positive religion, 533 
Cicero, 360 
Civil Law (see Law) 
Civilization, 177, 188 
Clifford, The late Professor, 52 
Coleridge on motives, 76 
Colour not in nature, 31 
Comte, empiricism of, 50 ; his 
great Being, 197 ; on mono- 
theism, 538 
Confucian classics, 382 
Confucius, 266, 369, 482 
Conscience, Bentham on, 67 ; 



Butler on, 85 ; origin of, 81 ; 

and the judgment of society, 

82 
Consciousness (see Self) 
Consensus gentium, 381 
Conservation of energy, 52 
Constantine, 281 
Corinth, church of, 529 
Councils, ecclesiastical, 19 (see 

also Chalcedon, Nicaea) 
Covenants, 422 
Creation continuous, 59, 106, 

171, 183, 293 
Creeds, 19 
Criticism, and Christianity, 10, 

296 
Cross, the (see Jesus Christ, 

Death of) 
Cynicism, Greek, characterized, 

113 
Cyrus, 348 



Daniel, Book of, its influence on 
Jesus, 11 

Dante, 198, 510 

Darwin, his doctrine of evo- 
lution, 39 ; his petitio prin- 
cipii, 47 ; on orchids, 54 ; 
his ethical theory, 70 

David, 367, 488 

Death, the human tragedy, 142 ; 
what life gains through, 144 

Deism, and the problem of evil, 
103 ; of Bolingbroke, 106 ; 
its shallowness, 108 ; its idea 
of a state of probation, 166 

Delphi, 552 

Democritus, 53 

Dhammapada, 382 

Disciples, their early view of 
Jesus, 313 

Dodona, 552 

Dominic, 263, 335 



572 



INDEX 



Domitian, 344 
Dumas, the elder, 428 
Duty, 81 
Dyaus, 541 

E 

Education, as a factor of char- 
acter, 312 ; influence of 
nature in, 137, 148 

Edwards, Jonathan, on the will, 
76 

Egressive method, the, in the 
theistic argument, 48 

Ego, universal, 90 ; of Fichte, 123 

Egypt, religion of, 189, 193, 208, 
219, 220, 239 ; empire of, 
231 ; pyramids of, 545 

Elijah, 367 

Energy, how known, 34 

Englishman and Hindu, 545 

Enoch, Book of, its influence on 
Jesus, 1 1 

Epicurus, 319 

Epistles, relation of, to Gospels, 
298 (see also Hebrews, Paul, 
Peter) 

Essay on Man, Pope's, 106 

Essenes, the, 491, 530 

Ethical supersedes cosmical pro- 
cess, 183 

Ethnography, 204, 208, 212 

Eucharist, the, 561 (see also 
Supper, Last) 

Euhemerism, 207 

Euripides, 254 

Evangelists as authors, 353, 358 

Evil, problem of, 94 ff. ; and 
faith, 97 ; and optimism, 99 ; 
and pessimism, 1 1 1 ; and im- 
mortality, 149 ; and the 
Incarnation, 168 ; not mere 
negation, 100 ; Leibnitz's 
idea of, 104 ; criticized, 155 ; 
kinds of, 1 34 ; physical, 



classes of, 136 ; arising from 
the interrelation of man and 
nature, 136 ; educative func- 
tion of, 137 ; evils peculiar to 
man, 141 ; inflicted by man 
on man, 146 ; evil, moral, its 
problem, 96 ; defined, 1 50 ; 
not disciplinary, 150 ; and 
freedom, 161 ; Divine interfer- 
ence no remedy for, 162 ; con- 
nexion of with suffering, 166 

Evolution, a theory of the cre- 
ational mode, 38 ; if taken as 
a Causal theory, problem of, 
38 ; must explain mind, 40 ; 
and speculation, 52 ; intelli- 
gence in, 54 ; means continu- 
ous creation, 59 ; and ethics, 
68 ; differentiation in, 7$ 

Experience, problem of, 6, 28 ; 
and pain, 135 

Ezekiel, Book of, its influence 
on Jesus, 11 ; the Temple in, 
488 ; priestly character of, 252 



Faith, and reason, 18 ; and 
knowledge, 201 ; and re- 
ligion, 286 ; described, 548 ; 
characteristic of the Christian 
religion, 549 ; and the Christian 
society, 528 

Family as a factor of character, 
312 

Fichte, ego of, 123, 397 ; in- 
fluence of, on Schopenhauer, 
122 

Forms of perception supplied 
by personality, 35 

Founder, of a religion, and re- 
former, 263 ; and the religion, 
286 ; operates in a congenial 
society, 264 ; significance of, 
for the religion, 264 



INDEX 



573 



Francis of Assisi, 263, 535 
Frazer on sacrifice, 482 n. 
Freedom, moral, problem of, 6 ; 
and personality, 30 ; and idea 
of energy, 34 ; and freedom of 
action, 75 ; implied in all 
moral judgements, 77 ; de- 
duced by Kant from the cate- 
gorical imperative, 88 ; and 
God, 157 ; the correlative of 
law, 160 



Gamaliel, 447, 466, 490 n., 527 

Ganges, 553 

Gibbon on Mohammed, 279 

Gloatz, 476 

God, the creative mind, 55, 57 ; 
idea of, immanent and trans- 
cendent, 58 ; omnipotent and 
omniscient, 58 ; Kant's de- 
duction of, from categorical 
imperative, 88 ; not an ab- 
straction, 153 ; omnipotence 
not a synonym for God, 134 ; 
impersonation of the absolute 
good, 1 54 ; no mere me- 
chanic, 157 ; immutable, not 
immobile, 159 ; juridically de- 
scribed, 163 ; Hebrew concep- 
tion of, 245 ; God in religion, 
537 ; in the Christian religion, 
539 ; moral sovereignty of, 
86, 89, 103, 108, 151, 164, 292 ; 
law and sanction to Him a 
unity, 164 ; Fatherhood of, 350, 
389, 543 ; God and man, dis- 
parity of, 8 ; real to each other, 
57 ; ever in active interrela- 
tion, 58 ; the end of creation 
His glory or man's good, 156 ; 
as reflected in His creature, 
156 ; mankind a unity to Him, 
165 ; His immanence in nature 



and man, 171 ; religion a 
mutual relation between Him 
and man, 202 ; His action in 
history, 225 ; and on man, 18 ; 
God and evil • why does He 
permit evil? 96, 152, 159; 
His interference no remedy 
for evil, 162 ; how interpreted 
by Christ and through Him, 

349, 339-41, 542-44 

Goethe, 52, 115 

Golden Rule, the, 382 

Gospels, strata in the, 10 ; 
secondary element in, 13 ; 
criticism of, 297 ; signifi- 
cance of, 306 ; the natural 
view of Jesus in, 310 ; the 
supernatural view of Jesus 
in, 324 ; Jesus a unity in, 
327 ; a study from life, 329 ; 
sanity of, 336 ; idea of God 
in, 349 ; reality of their world, 
386 ; as creations in literature, 
353 ; as books of religion, 358 ; 
unconscious art of, 359 ; not 
the work of literary men, 360 ; 
synoptics, date of, 297 ; rela- 
tion to Epistles, 298, 436 ; 
sources of, 298 ; compared 
with each other, 300 ; with 
Pauline Epistles, 443 ; the 
fourth, 19, 457, 477 (see also 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) 

Grace, doctrine of, 101, 165 

Greece, religion of, 192, 207, 
219, 236, 239, 473, 541, 549 

Greek, the characterized, 522 

Greek social ideal, 523 

Gregory of Nyssa, 337 ; the 
Great, 332 



H 



Haeckel, 42 
Hagar, 248 



574 



INDEX 



Happiness, as basis of morals, 
78 ; indefinite term, 79 ; and 
highest good in Kant's ethics, 
80 

Hebraism and Christianity, 261 ; 
and Judaism, 549 

Hebrew literature, its influence 
on Jesus, 11 ; narratives of 
the creation in, 246 

Hebrew religion, 249, 488, 532; 
limitation of, by tribal instinct, 
251 ; monotheism of, 244 ; in- 
fluence of Moses on, 267, 269 ; 
and sin, 372 ; conflict of pro- 
phet and priest in, 559 

Hebrews, Epistle to the, date 
of, 299 ; its affinities with 
Matthew, 300 ; Alexandrian, 

447, 499 ; idea of Christ in, 

448, 475 ; idea of the law in, 
485, 492 ; of the Temple, 487 ; 
interpretation of Christ's 
Death in, 494 ; the idea of the 
Church in, 531 

Hegel, on the Incarnation, 19 ; 
optimism of, 1 10 ; Schopen- 
hauer's dislike of, 122 ; on 
Greek religion, 236 

Hellenic spirit in the Gospels, 360 

Hellenism, 254, 454, 463, 491 ; 
of Luke, 301 ; of Paul, 463 

Heracleitus, 454 

Heredity, problem of, 147 ; edu- 
cative value of, 148 

Hesiod, 239, 541 

Hilarion, life of, 332 

ika<TT7)piov , 493 

Himalayas, 552 

Hindu philosophy, 117, 241 

Hinduism, 7, 219, 221, 240, 
549 ; compared with Vedism, 
260 

Hiuen Tsung, 276 

History, significance of, 176 ; 
order in, necessity of, 175 ; a 



late idea, 178 ; contrasted 
with the order of nature, 180 ; 
its cause mind, 181 ; how 
does it arise, 183 ; history a 
continued creative process, 
183 ; and psychology, 380 ; 
and speculation, 470 

Hobbes, on morals, 64 

Holman Hunt's Shadow of the 
Cross, 395 

Holy places, 550 

Homer, 198, 222, 239, 255, 308, 
5 10 

Hosea, Book of, its influence on 
Jesus, 11 

Hume, on miracles, 24 ; his 
philosophical principles, 24 ; 
speculation paralyzed in the 
school of, 50 ; his theory of 
morals, 66 

Huxley, on Man, 41 ; his ethical 
theory, 70 



Ideas and impressions, Hume's 
doctrine of, 24 

Illusions in history, 15 

Imagination, and mystery, 7 ; 
mythical action of, 12 

Immanence {see God) 

Immortality, Kant's doctrine of, 
88 ; in relation to the prob- 
lem of evil, 149 

Incarnation (of Christ), what 
kind of mystery, 7 ; and prob- 
lem of evil, 168 ; the idea in 
Hinduism, 275 

India, social system of, 193 {see 
Caste), religion of {see Brah- 
manism, Hinduism, Vedism) 

Intellect, the, and the intel- 
gible correspond, 35 ; intelli- 
gence in evolution, 34 

Isaiah, Book of, 250, 254, 367, 



INDEX 



575 



488 ; its influence on Jesus, 

11 
Islam, 7, 117, 217, 224, 230, 

2 77, S3 2 J and the sword, 

281 ; as a state, 283 ; its 

ultimate ideas, 284 
Isis, 552 
Isotta, 556 
Israel, religion of (see Hebrew 

religion, Judaism, Law) 



James and John, the disciples, 
401, 402-405 

Jeremiah, Book of, 488 ; its in- 
fluence on Jesus, 11 ; . mono- 
theism of, 250 

Jerome, 332 

Jerusalem, fall of, 299 ; Christ's 
entry into, 412 j attitude of, 
to Christ, 416 ; the holy place 
of the Jews, 553, 554 

Jesus of the Gospels and Christ 
of the Creeds, 3, 305-308 ; 
the natural view of Him in 
the Gospels, 310; super- 
natural view, 324 ; they con- 
stitute a unity, 327 ; a study 
from life, 329 ; Schmiedel on, 
302, 392 ; difficulty in the 
case of an imaginary history 
of, 350 ; simplicity yet com- 
plexity of the Gospel view, 
352 ; an unconscious sitter, 
359 J light and shadow in 
His life, 360 ; birth of, 326, 
349, 374; the temptation, 337; 
its continuance, 341 ; Jesus 
and Nicodemus, 352 ; and the 
woman of Samaria, 352 ; and 
the young ruler, 363 ; the 
charge against Him, 320 ; His 
entry into Jerusalem, 412 ; 
cleansing of the Temple, 413 ; 



lamentation over Jerusalem, 
416 ; His anointing for the 
burial, 417 ; before Pilate, 
319 ; and His disciples, 400 ff. 
(see also James and John, 
Judas, Peter) 

Jesus as teacher character- 
ized, 381 ; nature and man 
reflected in, 383 ; univer- 
sality of, 388 ; scope of, 
389 ; influence of, 392 ; reti- 
cence of the earlier teaching, 
391 ; claims advanced in, 
393 ; on His passion, 395 ; 
His kingdom, 406 ; the Apo- 
calyptic discourses, 417 ; in- 
terpretation of the Last Sup- 
per, 42 1 ; He changes the con- 
ception of God and man, 542 ; 
His parables, 384 ; parable of 
the barren fig-tree, 412 ; par- 
able of the husbandmen, 416 
metaphor of the corner stone, 
416 ; parable of the marriage 
supper, 416 ; parables pecu- 
liar to Luke, 302 ; His miracles, 
33°, 347, 443; their ethical 
character, 337, 342, 347 ; un- 
questioned even by His en- 
emies, 347 ; His social idea, 
523 ; its religious nature, 526 
His social method, 527 ; His 
character, its originality, 367 
catholicity, 368 ; potency 
370 ; not depraved by power 
346 ; nor alienated by it from 
man, 347 ; His ethical tran- 
scendence, 357 ; sinlessness, 
362 ; without consciousness 
of sin, 361 ; forgives sin, yet 
is guest of sinners, 364 ; His 
lowliness, 370 ; His passion 
in Gethsemane, 425 ; what it 
means, 427 ff. (see Christ) 

Jew, the, characterized, 522 



576 



INDEX 



Job, 248 

John, his conception of Christ, 

326, 451, 475, 502 
John the Baptist, 452 ; on 

Jesus, 362 
Jordan, 553 

Josephus, 299, 387, 491 
Jubal, legend of, 143 
Judaism, 253, 549 
Judas and Christ, 362, 430 
Julian, 427 
Juridical idea of moral evil, 1 50 

K 

Kali, 240 

Kant, compared with Mill, 51 ; 
on the moral law, 84, 87 ; the 
categorical imperative, 88 ; 
compared with Butler, 89 ; 
his influence on Schopenhauer, 
122 ; dictum of, 228 

Karma, 123 (see Merit) 

Keble, 333 

Keim, 414 n., 427 

Kepler quoted, n 

Kingdom of God, 389, 524 

Knowledge, ancient problem of, 
28 

Koran, 7, 388, 532 ; quoted, 278, 
280, 282'; autobiographical 
character of, 278 ; vision of 
Abraham in, 280 ; miracu- 
lous character of, 285 

Krishna, 7, 240, 541, 552 

Kung Fu Tze, 224 (see Con- 
fucius) 



465 ; curse of the, 504 ; dis- 
tinction of Rabbinical and 
Levitical, 484, 503 ; moral 
and physical distinguished, 
163 ; natural, 91 ; Roman (see 
Rome) 

Leibnitz, optimism of, 104 ; 
and Schopenhauer, 125 ; criti- 
cized, 155 ; philosophy of, 179 

Lewes, G. H., his History of 
Philosophy, 50 ; influenced by 
science, 52 

Life, its gain through death, 144 

Liddon's life of Pusey, 332 

Literature and religion, 198 

Lobeck, 236 

Locke, 24, 31 

Logia, 298, 380, 390, 435 

Logos, origin of the idea, 454, 
Philonian, 255, 454 ; of John, 
326, 452, 455 

Lourdes, 553 

Love, native to man, 508 ; of 
Penelope and Odysseus, 510; 
of Dante and Beatrice, 510; 
in the teaching of Jesus, 389 ; 
the law of the kingdom of 
God, 524 ; of Christ, 509 ; its 
power, 512 ; the new law, 514 

Lucretius, 239 

Luke's gospel, 296 ; Pauline, 
300 ; characterized, 301 ; dis- 
tinctive parables of, 301 ; 
style of, 325 ; idea of Jesus in, 
325 

\vTpOV, 4O4, 4IO 

M 



Lang, Andrew, on religion, 
Language, implies reason, 35 
Lao Tze, 224 

Law, and religion, 192 ; civil, 
62, 164, 532 ; Jewish, 248, 



Macedon, empire of, 231 

Mahabharata, 541 

Man interprets nature, 33 ; the 

key to all mysteries, 60 ; 

nature a problem to him, 172 ; 

acted on by nature, men, and 



INDEX 



577 



God, 182 ; a doer as well as 
thinker, 61 ; his responsi- 
bility, 133 ; his moral free- 
dom, 157 ; his capability of 
amelioration, 157 ; a problem 
to himself, 173 ; man and evil, 
94, 133; man and physical 
evil, 134 ; his fallen state, 167 ; 
unity of the race, 173 ; the 
race a unity to God, 165 ; the 
idea of his unity distasteful, 

174 ; signification of the idea, 

175 ; the unity as an imma- 
nent teleology, 176 ; his 
unity realized through Christ, 
547 ; his history continues 
the record of creation, 171 ; 
order in his history, 178, 181 ; 
material and spiritual outfit 
of savage and civilized man, 
188 ; is before history, 204 ; 
primitive, 204 ; man and God : 
his capacity for God, 156 ; his 
relation to God in religion, 
200 ; holy as God is holy, 250 
(see also God and man) ; 
Man and Christ': idea of man 
in the teaching of Jesus, 359 ; 
conception of man altered by 
Christ, 544 ; man dignified by 
Christ, 546 

Manu, laws of, 207, 559 

Marcus Antoninus, 344 

Mark, Gospel of, characterized, 
300 ; idea of Jesus in, 324 

Martha and Mary, 304 

Mary (the Virgin), 301, 535 ; 
and Jesus, 313 ; immaculate 
conception of, 374 ; appear- 
ance of, at Lourdes, 553 

Matter, problem of, 6 ; various 
definitions of, 52 ; mind has 
no reality for, 57 ; " matter, 
motion and force," 34 

Matthew, Gospel of, character- 
P.C.R. 



ized, 300 ; idea of Jesus in, 325 

Mecca, the holy place of Moham- 
medanism, 2S3, 284, 553, 554 

Medina, 281, 282 

Melchizedek, 248, 496 

Messiah (see Christ, names of) 

Messianic hope, the, 314, 599 ; in- 
fluence of upon the doctrine 
of the Person of Christ, 12 

Metaphysics of the Creed, 3 ; 
in the school of Hume, 50 ; of 
knowledge and ethics akin, 
64 

Mill, James, Analysis of the 
Human Mind, 50 ; on morals, 
67 

Mill, J. S., his metaphysics, 51 ; 
his qualitative distinction of 
pleasures, 67 ; his definition of 
the right, 78 ; his indictment 
of nature, 95 ; his religious 
instinct, 197 

Milton, 198 ; his Satan, 513 

Mind, problem of, 6 ; interprets 
nature, 33 ; is open to God, 
57 ; the cause of order in 
history, 181 (see also Per- 
sonality, Self) 
Miracles, Hume on their cre- 
dibility, 24 ; ecclesiastical, 335 
(see Jesus) 
Mohammed, 224, 553 ; his 
influence on Arabia, 193 ; his 
story, 279 ; monotheism of, 
280 ; myths concerning, 343, 
472 ; sensuality of, '369 ; and 
Christ, 530 ; and his religion, 

532 

Mohammedanism, compared with 
Brahmanism and Buddhism, 
277 (see Islam) 

Monotheism, Semitic, 217, 219 ; 

Hebraic, 244, 269, 473 ; of 

Mohammed, 280 ; a late 

development in religion, 538 

37 



578 



INDEX 



Moral ideal, the, immanent, in 
man, 90 

Moral ideas, sources of, 64 ; 
judgements depend on the 
idea of freewill, 61, 63 ; law 
immanent in man and the 
universe, 84 ; preceptive and 
vindicative, 166 ; freedom its 
correlative, 160 

Morality is social, 62 

Morals, theory of : individual- 
istic theory of Hobbes, 65 ; 
Hume's theory of social feel- 
ing, 65 ; Bentham's utili- 
tarianism, 66 ; evolutionary 
ethics, 68 ; Darwin's social in- 
stinct, 70 ; Spencer's " ideal 
congruity," 71 ; determinism 
of Jonathan Edwards, 76 ; J. S. 
Mill's criterion of happiness, 
78 ; Butler's doctrine of con- 
science, 85 ; Kant's cate- 
gorical imperative, 87 ; de- 
ductions, 89 

Morley, John, on Deism, 108 
(note) 

Moses, 254, 367, 482 ; his in- 
fluence on Israel, 267 ; and 
Christ, 528 

Motives, relation of, to will, 76 

Music, not in nature, 33 

Mystery, in religion, 4 ; of 
creation, 354 ; mysteries of 
nature, 5 ; of art, 6 ; man 
the key to all, 60 ; the Greek, 
419 

Mysticism, 366 ; Oriental, 522 

Mythical imagination, morbid- 
ness of the, 332 

Mythology, 7, 189 ; Vedic and 
Homeric, 222 ; Chaldaean, 
246 ; Greek, 472 ; tran- 
sitory character of, 356 ; con- 
tinues history, 472 

Myths of the Middle Ages, 335 ; 



of Buddha, 335, 472 ; of 
Mohammed, 343, 472 

N 

Napoleon, 407 

Naturalism, 23 

Nature, mysteries of, 5 ; Spin- 
oza's view of, 24 ; idea of 
criticized on Hume's prin- 
ciples, 24 ; cannot inter- 
pret man, 28 ; relations of, 
with personality, 30 ; colour 
and sound are not in, 31 ; 
interpreted by mind, 33, 55, 
291 ; evolves the involved, 40 ; 
stands in the supernatural, 
56 ; Mill's indictment of, 95 ; 
as cause of suffering, 136 ; as 
educative of man, 137, 148 ; 
universal motherhood of, 140 ; 
inexorable for beneficent pur- 
pose, 140 ; cannot speak the 
last word on evil, 168 ; a 
problem to man, 172 ; order 
in contrasted with order in 
history, 180 ; action of, on 
man, 181 ; does not create 
religion, 210 

Naturalism incompatible with 
the apostolic Christology, 23 

Neoplatonism of Augustine, 100 

Nero, 344 

Nicaea, Council of, 3, 321 

Nicholas of Cusa, 102 

Nicodemus, 352 

Nihilism, a form of pessimism, 
116 

Nirvana, 121, 274 



Obligation, Bentham on, 67 ; 

origin of, 81 ; Kant on, 87 
Odysseus, 510 



INDEX 



579 



Old Testament, 367, 393, 463, 

473 

Olympus, 552 

Omnipotence and omniscence 
(see God) 

Opportunity as factor of char- 
acter, 312 

Optimism, and the problem of 
evil, 99 ; of Plato and the 
Stoics, 99 ; of Augustine, 100 ; 
of Nicholas of Cusa, 102 ; of 
Leibnitz, 104 ; of Pope, 106 ; 
criticized by Voltaire, 108 ; 
of Spinoza and Hegel, no; 
of Socialism, 116; Buddhism, 
as an, 121 

Order in nature and history 
distinguished, 180 ; the child 
of religion, 192 (see also His- 
tory, Nature) 

Osiris, 24, 552 

Othman, 286 

Ovid, quoted, 552 



Pantheism, of Giordano Bruno, 
103 ; of Spinoza and Hegel, 
1 10 j of India and Greece, 
219 ; of Hindu philosophy, 
241 ; not a religion, 241 

Parables (see Jesus Christ) 

Pascal, 97, 382 

Passions, primary, their regula- 
tion, 184 

Passover, the, illustrates the 
death of Christ, 493 

Paul, an epitome of his day, 440 ; 
his epistles, 19, 207 ; their early 
date, 297 ; criticism of, 442 ; 
contrasted with the Synoptic 
Gospels, 443 ; idea of Christ 
in, 445 ; idea of the Church 
in 531 ; the psychological 
origin of his theology, 401 ; 



its sources, 463 ; his relation 
to the Jewish Law, 465, 504 
Paulus, 427 
Penelope, 510 

Persia, religion of, 193, 265 ; 
empire of, 231 

Person, a social unit, 181 ; a 
supernatural and the modern 
view of nature, 56, 60 

Personality, not to be elimin- 
ated from nature, 30 ; re- 
lations of, with nature, 30 ; 
interprets nature, 33 ; the 
vehicle of moral good, 91 ; 
natural factors of, 312 (see 
also Mind, Self) 

Persons, in the Godhead, 9 

Pessimism, causes of, 112; un- 
congenial to the Greek mind, 
113 ; compared with mediaeval 
asceticism, 114; of Goethe 
and Byron, 115 ; political, 
116 ; of philosophic Buddhism, 
119 ; of Schopenhauer, 120 ; 
of Von Hartmann, 127 ; ap- 
preciation and criticism of, 
129 

Peter, the informant of Mark, 
300 ; rebukes Christ, 313 ; 
confesses sinfulness, 362 ; con- 
fesses Christ, 397 ; rebuked 
by Christ, 398, 462 ; spokes- 
man of the disciples, 401 ; 
Epistle of, on the death of 
Christ, 501 ; his preaching at 
Fentecost, 527 

Pharisees, their view of Jesus, 
313, 490 ; their relation to 
the Apostles, 490 

Pheidias, 91, 198 

Philip, and Christ, 313 

Philo, 447, 463, 491 

Philosophy, problems of, 6 ; of 
religion (see Religion) 

Phoenicia, religion of, 191, 220 



5So 



INDEX 



Physical forces, the, and moral 
freedom, 34, 78 

Pilate, an impersonation of 
Rome, 318 ; convinced of the 
innocence of Jesus, 320, 361 ; 
his famous question, 320 ; 
vision of, 321 

Place, as a factor of character, 
312; in religion, 551 

Plato, quoted, u ; optimism of, 
99 ; Schopenhauer on, 122 ; 
and religion, 198, 239 ; on 
Socrates, 361 ; his ideal of 
manhood, 368 ; and the Chris- 
tian idea, 460 ; referred to, 
241, 254, 360 

Pleasure and pain as basis of 
morals, 65, 78 

Pletho, Gemisthus, 556 

Pliny, 321 

Plotinus, 100, 241 

Polytheism, vindicated by pan- 
theism, 241 ; of the Semites, 
268 ; cannot be moral, 538 

Pope, and the problem of evil, 
104, 106 ; compared with the 
speculative physicism of to- 
day, 109 

Portiuncula, the, 555 

Positivism (see Comte) 

Preaching, Christian, 562 

Priesthood, Aaronic, 494 

Priests, the Jewish, their relation 
to Christ and the Apostles, 
490 

Probation, state of, a Deistic 
idea, 166 

Proclus, 549 

Protagoras, 549 

Psalms, the, influence of, on 
Jesus, 1 1 ; sacred book of 
Monotheism, 250 

Psychology of secondary quali- 
ties, 31 

Ptolemies, the, 254 



Pajari, the, 240 

Pusey, Dr., morbidness of his 
sense of sin, 333 

Q 

Qualities, secondary, 31 ; are 
not things of external nature, 
33 

R 

Race, as a factor of character } 
3" 

Raphael, 91, 198 

Reason, antinomies of the pure, 
5 ; mysteries of, 6 ; and 
faith, 19 ; can only live in a 
rational world, 35 

Redemption, 166 (see also Christ) 

Reformer and founder of re- 
ligion, 263 

Regressive method, the, in the- 
ism, 41 

Religion, aesthetic, 4 ; mystery 
in, 5 ; creative of order, 185, 
192 • philosophy of, 186, 226 ; 
phenomena of, 187 ; scientific 
view of, 195, 205 ; is neces- 
sary to man, 196 ; as archi- 
tectonic idea, 198 ; problems 
of, 199 ; idea of, 200 ; Herbert 
Spencer on, 205 ; ethno- 
graphic and historical method 
in, compared, 208, 213 ; rooted 
in reason, 210 ; conditioned 
by nature, 211 ; conflict of 
ideal and formal in, 216 ; 
influence of race on, 216 ; 
of place on, 218 ; of ethnical re- 
lations on, 220 ; of history on, 
221 ; of social idea on, 222 ; 
of great personalities on, 223 ; 
of idea and institution in, 235 • 
opposed action of custom 



INDEX 



581 



and thought in, 239 ; never 
a pantheism, 241 ; Hebrew 
idea of, 247 ; and founder, 
286 ; and people, 520 

Religions, vision of, in history, 
191 ; of India and Greece 
compared, 221 ; as national 
and missionary, 230 ; spon- 
taneous and founded, 259 ; 
positive, 532 

Renaissance, and the problem 
of sin, 102 

Renan, on Semitic languages, 
217 ; on Luke, 325 ; on the 
Agony, 427 

Responsibility, of the individual 
and the race, 165 (see also 
God and man) 

Rig Veda, 207, 388, 541, 559 

Rishi, the, 559 

Ritschl, on Xvrpov, 404 ; on the 
Death of Christ, 492 n. 

Roman, the characterized, 522 

Roman Catholic worship, 536 ; 

553,555 

Romanoff, house of, 344 

Rome, law of, 91, 231, 523, 
545 ; religion of, 192, 193, 
207, 518, 523, 549, 559; 
empire of, 231, 299 ; fall 
of, 299, 321 ; impersonated 
in Pilate, 318 ; influence 
of, on Jesus, 11 ; on Paul, 
464 



Sacrifice, Frazer on, 482 n. 
Sadducees, their view of Jesus, 

314 
Samaria, woman of, 352 
Savage man, mystery of thought 

in, 195 ; and religion, 215 
Science, immensity of its field, 



194 ; inadequacy of, 194 ; and 
religion, 195 
Schleicher, on matter and spirit, 

5 2 

Schleiermacher, 428 

Schmiedel, on the Gospels, 302, 
392 

Scholasticism, mediaeval, follows 
Augustine, 102 

Schopenhauer, pessimism of , 121 ; 
influenced by Kant, Fichte, 
and Buddha, 122 ; com- 
pared with Buddua, 125 ; 
representative of tendency of 
the age, 128 ; his idea of God, 

154 

Secondary qualities, 31 

Seeberg on Ritschl, 492 n. 

Seleucidae, 253 

Self, the, Hume on, 25 ; con- 
ception of, in a " system of 
nature " (see also Mind, Per- 
son j&tjO 

5eff-ri uiza.fion, the law of hu- 
mas progress, 90 

Semites, monotheism of the, 
217, 219 ; social system of, 
223 ; religion of, 230, 532 

Seneca, on sin, 372 

Septuagint, 254 

Servant of God, the suffering, 
398, 469, 501 

Shelley, idealism of, 115 ; quoted, 

131 
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, 

556 
Simon Magus, 347 
Sin, as the occasion of grace, 

101 ; Christian idea of, 103 ; 

nature of, 150 ; original, 165 ; 

sense of, awakened by the 

cross, 373, 433 
Sinlessness, idea of, 373, 376 

(see also Jesus, character 

of) 



582 



INDEX 



Siva, 240 

Slavery, ancient, 544 

Social problem, the, 147 ; ideal 
of Greece and of Christ, 523 

Socialism, a form of optimism, 
116 

Socrates, 361, 549 

Solomon, 248, 488 

Son of man, origin of the con- 
ception, 1 1 

Sound, not in nature, 31 

Sovereignty, moral, of God (see 
God) 

Space, problem of, 6 ; Hume 
on, 25 

Species, origin of, 38 

Spencer, Herbert, on morals, 
71 ; his anthropological theory 
of religion, 206 

Speculative age, the, preceded 
by the historical, 470 

Spinoza, his pantheistic op- 
timism, no; and Schopen- 
hauer, 124 ; his idea of God, 
t S4j j 79 ; pantheism of, 241 

Spirit, is thought made con- 
crete, 55 ; the real creation of 
God, 57 

Spontaneous generation, 49 

State, judgement of the, 62 ; 
Islam as a, 281, 283 ; physical 
penalties of the, 533 ; and 
religion, 534 

Steinmeyer, 428 

Stephen, 491, 520 

Stoic, ideal of perfect man, 90, 
357 > optimism, 99 ; oppo- 
sition to pessimism, 113; 
definition of moral evil, 1 50 ; 
view of religion, 239 ; Logos, 
454 ; influence on Paul, 464 ; 
idea of unity of the race, 547 ; 
ethics, 559 

Strauss, 128, 427 

Struggle for existence, 38 ; moral 



problem of, 109 ; pathos of, 
128 

Suffering, 166 (see also Evil) 

Sulpicius, 337 

Supernatural, modern antipathy 
to the, 23 ; true and false 
ideas of the, 56 

Superstition, nature of, 206, 553 

Supper, the Last, 419 ; narra- 
tives of, 419 ; interpreted by 
Christ, 421 

Survival of the fittest, moral 
problem of, 109 

Synagogue and Temple con- 
trasted, 484, 487 

Syncretism, 517 ; Christianity 
is not a, 518 

Synoptists (see Gospels) 



Tabernacle, the, 487 

Tabula rasa, 29 

Tacitus, quoted, 552 

Tao-teh King, 382 

Temple, the, 415 ; Christ the 
true, 457 ; and synagogue, 
484, 487 ; and the Apostles, 
489 ; in the Apocalypse, 502 

Tennyson, quoted, 95 

Tertullian, 337, 382 

Theodicee, of Leibnitz, 104 

Thucydides, 360, 387 

Tiberius, 344 

Time, problem of, 6 ; Hume on, 
25 ; as a factor of character, 
312 

Trajan, rescript of, 321 

Transcendence of will and 
thought, 78 

Transcendental elements in 
knowledge, 51 

Transcendental and supernatu- 
ral, the, 55 

Tyndall quoted, 55 



INDEX 



533 



U 



Unity of man (see Man) 

Upadana of Buddha, 124 

Upanishads, 388 

Ur-Marcus, 435 

Utilitarianism, 65, 78 ; cannot 
explain the categorical im- 
perative, 83 



Vanini, 427 

Varuna, 541, 559 

Vatican, Council, Decrees of the, 

207 
Vedanta, 241 
Vedic mythology, 222 ; religion, 

260, 541 ; India, 271 
Virtue as an element of the 

highest good, 88 
Vishnu, 240 
Voltaire, the Candide of, 108 ; 

unconscious theodicy of, 108 ; 

on Mohammed, 278 
Von Hartmann, pessimism of, 

127 ; Strauss on, 128 

W 

Wallace, Alfred, praises Darwin, 
54 



Weismann, 39 

Wendt, 405, 476 

Wheel of existence, 119 

Will, problem of, 6 ; explains 
energy, 34 ; freedom of the, 
76 (see Freedom) ; a creative 
force, 89 ; idea of, in Fichte 
and Schopenhauer, 123 

Wisdom literature, influence of, 
on Jesus, 1 1 

Witchcraft, 346 

Worship and theology, 480 ; 
and religion, 551 j and the 
institution, 557 ; potent in- 
fluence of, on religion, 558 ; 
Christian, the creation of God, 

562 ; defines the worshipper, 

563 ; end of, 564 

X 

Xenophanes, 239 
Xenophon on Socrates, 361 



Zem -Zem, the well, 553 
Zeno, 254 
Zeus, 349, 541 
Zoroaster, 224, 265 
Zcroastrianism, 7 



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